Tea and Poison

She says she knows she cannot cross the Styx no pay for the ferryman nailed underneath a stiffened

tongue     No time to separate wind from air I say, now the grains of chaff are all already sown, now

 

the hard rasps of specters at transparent doors. No negative capability. Plague is too tight for beauty

I whisper. Beauty was a tight once-upon party dress. Now it bulges with me in it. Heartbeats hum

 

at its seams in here and in here. I climb an island’s hills. Nap on its paths under drizzle through the

banyan’s hundred curled arms. In here, under my tired-of-night skin, a different thrum. Sex, under

 

its cleavage and its hidden molecules. Under its fever I only imagine. I don’t have it.     A heat is

layers underneath. Under the skeletal cage, a small animal in it, craze-running on her iron wheel.

 

Under the tongue where I was urged for the coin that could pay the boatman I choose to ignore.

I’ll no longer know what an island is.     A hurricane.     A woman.     A corpse.     Inside the body,

 

a red chameleon preens. The flowering geranium I refuse to meet. But clean and clean a skin between

its crevices, to match the chameleon. Remember how ticks and centipedes can enter a house? How

 

some god swiped my name from birth and kept it in his pocket? Underneath his pocket, he’s naked.

What does he do with his nakedness? If I am naked, I am safe, yes? Pure as an infant, wise as a crone,

 

naked as the day she was hatched. Why did he need my name? Now I need it. The boatman would

swallow it in place of a coin. He won’t kiss me though.     Even a boatman can catch the wind—

 

—     why am I—be specific—why am I always the woman who asks how close is death how

near is God? I have no other question.     None. No other lens under my one eye. Beauty I owl-

 

screech, asleep and awake. Beauty. Come for me now. Sheath me, embalm me, love me a little. A

Lethe of hands.     Humility?     My thanks for inviting me to tea and poison. The cup that passes.

 

Yet that untaught gift : the presence of surge—


Also by Margo Berdeshevsky

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