Lisken Van Pelt Dus

 Poems

Naming the Beast

Name the beast: a gash, 

a pair of disembodied eyes, 

a river broken. Ignore the dark country 

of its terrible origins. 

     I try –

no go. A name contains a history. 

Fear is a danger lying in wait, says

nothing, silence massing. Shame

covers itself in its own blood.

The most important question 

isn’t why but what, you insist, 

but when I look into the darkness 

to name it

you tell me to turn forward:

Living is rightfully 

concerned with the present. 

Yes. But the horizon 

is all around us. 

Panic 

lives in caves that speak 

to lonely people, on mountains 

with too vast a sky. 

Failure arranges paving stones 

to trip me.

        Why 

is the instrument of what,

dwells in the same lair.

The beast scored me.

Excavation 

Twenty-four thousand years ago the brains,

guts, muscles, and reproductive systems

of who knows how many bdelloid rotifers 

(bdelloid, from Greek: leech; 

rotifer, Latin: wheel-bearer) froze solid, 

and they have lived in cryptobiosis

(concealed or secret mode of life) ever since, 

until scientists dug them up 

from under eleven feet of permafrost 

in northeastern Siberia (a name that may 

or may not derive from a Tatar word

for sleeping land), and when thawed

they came back to life and promptly

reproduced – in their asexual way, 

parthenogenesis (virgin birth), which would make them

such an outlier in evolutionary biology

that they have been called “scandalous,”

which is funny because it’s usually sex 

that attracts moral opprobrium –

and the scientists can only conclude 

that they “now have more questions 

than answers,” which is ever the case anyway, 

despite science coming from Latin knowledge,

and they are, besides, dealing with creatures

whose subkingdom evolved a dozen epochs

before anything resembling humans 

began thinking, bleeding, sleeping, 

procreating, keeping secrets, judging, 

or presuming (from Proto-Indo-European: 

to take up from under) to know anything at all.

When the Fireflies
Call Your Name

When you hear your name being called

from out of the middle of what you know

to be silence, go ahead and listen.

Hear the words beyond words humming

in the vibrations of this particular assembly.

Hear your name intoned as if you are dead,

mourning become a kind of mantra,

sad but celebratory, a purring, silky thing

like a satisfied cat.  It doesn’t matter

if what you hear lacks translatability.

That’s what makes it mourning in the first place.

Though we behave as if reality 

were within easy reach, we know 

we perceive only a fraction of what’s there.  

The stars have conspired to be fireflies this evening,

have divested themselves of scale

to enter your night.  Why not?

For these few hours, forget distance.

If the stars can fall to earth and dance

above the daisies in the meadow

just when you are there to watch them,

you can do no less in return

than travel willingly through the darkness

and follow wherever the voice leads.

Letters from the New World

The fat woodchuck who ambled across our lawn

probably didn’t remember eating our cosseted flowers

just as they were about to bloom or

the screams of its cousin shot imprecisely

with a bow before you decided 22-shorts

would be okay, city limits be damned, 

and I think: a bullet in the gut’s not the same

as the bullet shot, the woodchuck

understood nothing but the crack

of thunder from a casement window, not 

you, not your words, your world –

the way relatives in sixteenth century Spain 

read letters from the New World, unable

to fathom living in a city that floated on water or 

being thought a god whose unintelligible name

is sung from pyramids or carved 

into the haft of sacrificial blades. 

Keeping all knives sharp is still

a ritual some people care about,

my father among them, though you insist

he does it wrong, and I concede since it’s you

after all who has cut up animals before 

they were roasted, who’s known since childhood

the taste of metal lingering from bullets 

while my family armed itself against anemia 

with creamed spinach or, with luck, 

a Snickers bar savored later in the dark 

as Michelle, ma belle taught me French 

and the discourse of lust, and my deepened 

blood roared like the trains passing now under

our Osaka hotel window where we have flown

across an ocean, with only each other familiar, even 

your penknife confiscated, not even knives at table.

You say that since you don’t understand the language, 

you don’t feel responsible here.  You like that, 

you tell me, it’s a relief, and I say, yes, I understand.

There’s nowhere to stand in our tiny room so we kneel

on the bed and look out at train after train – endless

incomprehensible lives carried on iron tracks.

Edmonia Lewis Carves Hagar

If in the course of chiseling

I gouge her eye, shatter her nose –

what do I do?

Hagar knows about survival

as well as I – 

stony silence, 

injustice of expulsion

for sins that were not ours.

Metamorphic rock like this

understands resistance, too,

inhabits hardness – its own 

and the battering –

in the beginning 

it was pearls and snails

ground to slow limestone,

crystallized only

under pressure, heat 

birthing marble.

Hagar founded 

a race of kings.

I rasp her hair back,

tilt her chin up, 

chisel anew.