Mocking
Bird Hotel
A
woman’s hallelujah! washes the foot of Mocking Bird
Hill,
her face eclipsed by her black mouth,
her
eyes rolled up like workman’s sleeves.
Stirred
up, a fly speaks in the tongue of the hotel
doorbell,
where, on the sun-ridden straw terrace
my
salvation means less than praise
to
a dumb child. Damned, blinded by ice cubes,
the
fly surrenders its life into the waiter’s clean hands.
Behind
the kitchen of the Mocking Bird Hotel
a
rooster repeats hallelujah! until it loses its head.
A
man harvests the Family Tree before his forefathers’
features
have a chance to ripen on their faces. Parakeets
watch
him from the bare nerves of the garden. He harvests
before
the worms that eat his father turn into demons.
Do
not eat the fruit from your Family Tree. You have
eyes
not to see them, hands not to pick them, teeth
not
to bite them, tongue not to taste them even in speech.
The
waiter slashes the table with our bill. We descend
Mocking
Bird Hill without raising dust. Dogs,
their
fur hanging like wet feathers off their backs,
piss
yellow smoke without lifting a leg. Gulls
smash
their heads between their wings.
Light
lays eggs of shadows under the shrubs.
Produce
shacks stand empty like football gates.
What
appeared blue from afar, turns green.
I hold
it all in, even my own urine.
But
the mother of vowels slumps from my throat
like
the queen of a havocked beehive.
Higher
than hallelujah! rising like smoke over the hill,
I
scream at the top of that green lung,
why, in
the Mocking Bird
Hell,
do you value your blood over your sweat,
that
bitterness over this salt, that wound over this
crystal?
But often to shed light on the darkness,
light
isn’t enough. Often what I need is an even darker
darkness.
Like in those hours before the sun incriminates this
hotel,
his two nostrils that illuminate our benighted bodies.
Source
of the text – Valzhyna Mort, Collected
Body. Port Townsend, WA: Copper
Canyon Press, 2011, p. 4-5.
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