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Christian Hawkey

Sonnets in the Mouth of an Elizabethan Wolf

 

I’m laughing like this because my boss
is watching me. Fireflies, little penises,
cubicles. A tongue sewn from the wings
of dragonflies is a tongue beautifully tied
to itself. I saw, in gradual vision thru my tears
a red meadow & a wolf with a throat
dangling, glazed with rain
& the memory of rain, its clear
wet fur, its meatlessness
a text whose mystic Shape did move
behind me, & drew me back by the Haare.
My cat just burped. Without a word I am fired.
A silver, surgical cam emerges from my lips. Your lips
I don’t recognize until they fill the monitor’s screen.



So these eyelids unalone as in a body
a word in sight is shared, spoken, a
mouse the color of cinnamon, its pink hand
on my toe, rain a theory of information forming
between drops. Full stops. Every pattern drowns out
any sound other than the sound monitored
by breathing. Our hands would touch all
the refrigerators. Hum something such.
Frequencies, placed here, the worldly jars.
A childhood photograph is the only example
silence in a yellow bunny suit requires.
Who tied my ears above my head & carried me
faster than stars dream of forgetting arrival
home? I was pinned, naturally, to this polluted air.



Unlike like. Hypothetically a sound. Dream
a Queen wrongly & sunlight a glass throat
that records a hundred brighter eyes for
laughter, bent light, for blinking, a quick night,
for briefly a face is a face & then a guest,
its wings, shadow of, lifting. Hello Monday.
Hello winter. Hello cold the first cold a blue jay
blurs into, screams into, snow. I when the phone rang
a letter. Instantly a text message the air in Berlin
is here: your eyes so wide they were breathing.
Sky so wide a whiteness. Block by block the city
when we closed the door behind us fell away
until we heard it arrive at soundlessness. Your heart
pushed into air, pushed aside the air, hung there.



My pet cricket is missing a leg & therefore
he only squeaks in circles. Repeat after me
he chirps bleakly. Then he falls over, exhausted.
Hands when holding other hands or waving are happy.
I wave to my hand. My hand waves back. My cat
sniffs the surface of the word bird with a longing
specific to language. Kung Fu I love you.
That’s my cricket’s name. He is in truth ugly
& bitter & overly oiled as any machine
that doesn’t allow pubic hair in sex. This
just in. I am long departed. John Clare unaware
of what I might even call me I hear
upon thy lips the clean breath of insects.
Basically, I can’t stop spying on my master.



I have a secret wolf. Its ears are made of ice.
I whisper into them & its eyes turn an arctic shade
of blue. When it moves away from me I hold its tail
& its body like a long grey ribbon unravels air.
There are ashes at my feet. This great heap of grief
was there before I was here, although whatever wind
lifted once to dust my eyes could only see by
not weeping. There are ribbons in my mouth.
Each is tied to a firefly. Each lifts a light.
Each light a throat hides begins to leak in dimples.
The moon howls a round sound. Der Mond in German
is masculine. The sun a pool of golden Haare the city
at sunrise sinks into. Climb the nearest rooftop.
Strip before diving every article to skin.



Red noise of your organs. A satellite swivels
in space. Nevermore alone upon a threshold
kissing. Our cell phones ring in the freezer.
Yesterday I smell from your lips. Yesterday
a jackhammer splintered my bones into concrete
which is why I can only mouth the words I love you,
which is why the methods we were given to separate
a noise from its construction—I write this,
for example, wearing earplugs. My breathing sounds
labored, vaguely Vaderish. I close my eyes & see
an owl perched on a satellite dish. Beneath the roar
of Monday Night Football the period-sized soft eyes
of a mouse, blinking in the dark. Noiselessly
he swivels his head around, all the way to himself.



Airplane, circling. Wind a tree in motion.
Construction. Chimes. Church bell. Cat breath.
My breath. Electric hum of a machine, typing.
Another airplane on another plane. Wind a breath
in breathing. Wet lips, parted. A mouth breather.
A wheezer. A thought kicks off its Memory Foam slippers
one by one I hear a pair of eyes, blinking, lids
or lips or a stuttered utterance, angel of autism
betwixt me & the dreadful outer brink of obvious
noise I caught a gold bullet in my teeth by
reading. I listen to what I want. This
electric text. These hips. This outlet named
The Wind I plug into & watch your hair lift off
in waves & wave goodbye to your beautiful head.



One ear to your stomach, another to the sky.
Oh to be an angel (if there were any!) & go
straight into your body & look around
& maybe kiss the back of your lips with my lips
or whisper something, softly, “You are not alone
in the galaxy, my child, belly buttons are sphinxes,
a body riddled with answers, Tibetan monks
smell like sperm, tenderness is a touch monitored
by snails & sadness: an airspace, owned by Disney”
—O if we could lean back, &, leaning, widen
our eyes like Montgomery Clift! (His eyebrows
were doubled by those of an angel, standing in him.)
The coroner, after inspecting the body, only noted
he had an innie, an innie so far in it was missing—gone.



Speak within a mouth only when kissed. Blow
my cheeks out. Voice a box set set on vibrate.
Air & air constricted a blue streak, a wave
shaped by teeth O with O the letter O a howl
corrupts in extension a throat as if a comma
silenced, there where an airborne noise
proliferates. Someone crying in the next apartment,
walls the illusion of privacy, voices
in the ceiling vent & fake rain & NASDAQ’s
string of numbers moving over my eyes
which are closed—I move them to the right,
then left, I am dreaming the words I am dreaming
a wolf with frozen, torn pads, moving over snow,
there where they disappear, a red gift given absence.



I can’t stop eating with my mouth. The sun
falls around a thought in the shape of a letter.
The letter is lit. A word lit. The eye clicks on it.
The word an image I can’t stop clicking on
with these fingers poured from my hands, these
hands poured from my wrists, these wrists poured
from my arms, these arms lodged in the mouth
of a wolf drawn in rain, red crayon, string, ink.
It belongs to no one this side of a sound
sampled from the sound of someone eating
peanuts. The shells are shaped like cat turds.
Peanuts come from the ground, where cats
bury their turds. Here, there is no light. Here,
cats rise from the ground with immaculate breath.



Our red-eye reduction: no flash but flashing each
the other in the dark. Our bones in an uncertain light
a neon seen nowhere but in deep seas, all phosphor, all
green algae. The Beloved called Love a fucker
but Love as Love was too stupid to understand
the compliment. Lean a little closer. You I see
as two when my eyes are X’d by proxy—proximity.
& your glow-in-the-dark tattoo is the word tattoo
across your eyelids, hovering above me, I’ve got
one eye closed too & wide with wandering is how
the other found you. O Jacques Cousteau! C’est toi
in the sub next to us? Sub in mission for mersion
& we sweat silver, not salt. Focus blurs to surface,
a space left to stay awake. Love replies: EAT ME.



Yellow prepositional leaves—no, just leaves—
packed in the mouth of a grey squirrel
all the more grey in branches backed by a
fuck this. A marionette climbs out of a grave.
& a child sings, working the strings. Yellow leaves
fall around her like hands the eye coordinates
by turning, waving—this is not a program altho
the screen on which I view her hand freezes, I mean
my eye freezes, the leaves one inch from the ground,
suspended, squirrel above in mid-twitch, the girl
the adopted daughter of a neighbor, cursor
like a tiny black bird affixed to her upper lip
when I notice, finally, her left hand, blown off
as an infant by some other, actual machine.



Eyes within eyes within eyes as an eye. It
blinked. A bird folded the claws in its claws.
The sun shot pills. The pills were numbered.
Surface from the side I focus on you a collage
& love, so wrought, may be unwrought so
& suspended in a secret, exploded & frozen
& the moment of explosion: a map. I spread it
out as if it were a thought the mind stands over,
thinking. I repeats I. The bird unzips its feathers
made of moth wings & red leaves & penises & flies off
with the word naked. Then the artist enters the room.
I look him in the wrong eye. The eye made of glass.
The glass is flawed. A bubble floats in his pupil
with nothing—not even your bird—in it.

CHRISTIAN HAWKEY is the author of The Book of Funnels and the chapbook HourHour. His new book, Citizen Of, was just released by Wave Books.

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