THE BEAST SPEAKS
The heart trembles before what the heart wants
and what the heart wants is answers. To be
loved is not enough. The temporariness of surfaces.
A gross familiarity of shapes. They crave assurances
of hidden worth. Are promises kept in an apron
or in the fur of his paws. It is never enough
to be only beautiful because some beauty is cruel
or masked or imagined. A tale to tell yourself.
The flesh of the lover is covered in fur. Clawed
and horned. Riven with lice. She seeks
the changeable man, pledges to bring him
into the light. As if a bath undoes the beast.
The scrub brush of the lover putting a shine
on a dull stone. Dress me in a suit, take me
in a long car to your father’s ball. See
if you can stop me even once from feasting
with dirt on my hands. Convince yourself
that this is love, if you need love so much.
A BLOTCH, A WHIRL, A TALE TO TELL
Every tale embarked with a sketch or else
a scrawl. A mark of the pen across the page,
ascending black ink revealing a red hood
or else a poison apple or else golden hair
tumbling from a tower. The pen leaves
blotches of ink in the corner of words,
makes too permanent a period. Stop.
Often it is enough to merely suggest.
When the teller of tales lifts the pen
from off the page, the world disappears.
A wolf cut off in mid-howl, a prince
who will never penetrate the bower
of briars. Everything is fragmentary.
You draw the pages so close you can smell
the ink. Inside every blotch is another story,
inside every whorl is a world, but not
for you. The tale refuses your invitation
to leave the page. All the rest of your life
remaining to be lived within the residual,
whatever lingers after the woodsman.
PRISONERS ALL
Beauty matters, despite or in spite the blood
and the knives. In a fairy tale it helps to be fair.
It helps to be lovely. A girl in a tale wins
not by good works alone, not only the forever
present of the domestic. There are flowers
in the forest. They speak in glamours
and warnings. There are wolves in the woods.
It is easy to be blinded by warm sunlight
dappling in the groves. The frogs are princes,
the princes ogres and trolls. What difference
does it make. It is only slightly more difficult
to discriminate between a heel made of glass
and a shackle.
HUNGER
When she wants meat,
meat. When she wants blood,
blood. When she craves to taste
the yellow curd of marrow,
she snaps a rib in half, licks
amidst the splinters. No more delay
between the wanting and the having,
the being given.
At last an end to abjection
in the belly of a wolf.
And isn’t this also love.
DREAM WITH END
A woman who never touches a spindle
might live forever. But Frigg and Freya,
Artemis and Athena, they could not escape.
Distaffs and bobbins, threads spun and measured
and cut and cast down. In Greece some break
the arms of their statues. Shatter the elbows
and the throat. Disfigure the genitals.
In another land folk carve no statues
for sleeping beauties, nothing lasts
except the girls themselves: see Briar Rose,
a body caught in the static. Then a bent knee,
the sour breath of an unprompted kiss. Time
begins again. Her death awakens. Its slumber
ended with hers. Everything and the world
now lit into passing splendor. No beauty thrills
without the knowledge of its end. We clutch
what we will not keep. In her sleeping century
she had such extraordinary dreams. A field
of flowers, all thorns, surrounding a tower
or else a tunnel. An infinity of blooming upon
blooming, wild colors calling out to a stilled sun.
Once she believed each rose was a world.
Now her prince speaks his devotion into the
waking sameness. Somewhere her new children
are crying for her breast. Hunger everywhere,
disease everywhere else. She hears the whirr
of thread, slowing. She hears a thousand
thousand blossoms falling from the stem,
petals rasping into the hibernal dirt.
Her only world layered in grief. She waits
to wake, to wake again, wake further.
–––––––
Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods. He teaches creative writing at Northern Michigan University.