the world is full of alchemy, so let there be questions and demands

How convenient, I say, to the dark. Because this 

is what I do when I cannot sleep: sit in darkness 

flicking through the god channels, sneering 

and answering back, while the neon 

 

tetras beneath their flickering tube light weave 

their Möbius strip through the wet fire 

of the only world they know; while a man 

who makes it dishonest for a woman 

 

to disown her desires—a man 

whose body becomes, during sex, 

one long wound—sleeps across the hall 

in a king-size bed. Every scar is a door 

 

and I have never known scars like his: shrapnel, 

bullet, knife blade. The English, I told him 

once, as I placed the welter of my lips to his damages 

one by one, assume the French verb blesser—

 

to wound—means to bless; and he, 

without remembering he said it, 

said: the way in and the way out—the doors 

to heaven are always small. This is a man who beguiles

 

even the dirt up from its knees, whose hands 

conjure a body for me out of the body I have; and yet 

every bed is a death bed; and yet, the only door 

out of the body is death. Outside, a great city 

 

and its troubled history under rain.
How is it we can be loved 

so well and remain so famished still?
I rejoice, says the preacher, in the celibate life; 

 

the thought of one day dying
into heaven. Behind him, deep in an alcove, 

washed by slow strobes of alternating colour, 

Jesus, life-size and on the cross, turns
 

from blue to red to yellow 

and I am back, suddenly, 

at those dreadful Youth Club discos—

all cheap lighting and tinny reverb 

 

and hidden pints of liquor—where I 

once let a boy called Martin nudge his hand, 

centimetre by centimetre—as if 

I would not notice—up under my blouse
 

until it came to rest, fingers spread, clamped 

over my left breast like a fleshy starfish.
I let him because he was tall, a bad boy, 

every girl's crush. And because my desire
 

was beginning to acquire a formal structure.
In this life, proclaims the preacher, as Jesus 

turns yellow turns orange turns green, we are all 

under siege, beset by temptations. I watch
 

as a single tetra, little morsel of colour, breaks 

from the neon spackle of the crowd 

and drifts upwards to place the dark foyer 

of its tiny mouth 

against the roof of its world. And what use, 

really, is this life, if it's not one long 

sheath of longing. We are all under siege, 

he says, afflicted, bedevilled, assailed 

 

by carnality, so let us pray. Let us pray, he says, 

for the wavering virgins. Now I say 

it is the poet's duty to wait,
to wait in the dark, to wait in the dark 

 

at the world's mercy
for moments such as this. In the beginning 

is the word. And the word 

is sex. In the beginning is the kiss 

 

that gives rise to the myth of Eden—that bright 

landscape unfettered by history
that we create when placing our open mouth 

to the open mouth of another
 

for the very first time. And yet there is 

no garden in which the lion ever will 

lie down with the lamb. And like this 

the whole body becomes an eye turned 

 

to nothing
but its own pleasure. And every time 

we lie down to assuage our loneliness, 

we find the flesh already there,

waiting. And all we ever want to do 

is undo the violence of this world, and yet 

that's how we lie down—with need
and avarice. In the beginning, as I remember it,
 

    is a walled garden, staples of croquet hoops 

    punched into a lawn. Beyond, in a field, 

    a horse with a tail so long it brushes the grass.
    Late summer. Farm work. Room and board 

 

    and pocket change for college. Summer's end, 

    then; cut fields at dusk and hawks slicing low 

    over the brittle blonde pipes of stubble.
    So many lives already undone
 

    by the round scythes of the combine.
    At night from my single bed I listen to the pauses 

    and the breaks in the bicker of the shower 

    as the farmer's eldest son turns
 

    and twists beneath it in the small bathroom 

    along the hall. When I imagine his body—which I do, 

    and often—it's as a series of broad, 

    quiet rooms inside the rattle of falling water.
 

    He becomes a man made up of absence.
    In the beginning (as I remember it) he puts on 

    his boots and waxed jacket and walks out 

    with his dog and a shotgun

    into the fields. I do not remember 

    the gun's report, but if I am not with him 

    why are there pigeons, all flash    
    and clatter, breaking for the open; why do I feel, 

 

    still, the sudden change
    in their purchase on the air—a few seconds 

    of wild churn and scramble before the spin down 

    into the stubble. There is the unlit weight
 

    of each skull's chamber, the beak's 

    loose tweezers, the eyes' eclipse.
    With the harvest in, with summer over, 

    with his parents at church again every Sunday,
 

     it is inevitable, really. And afterwards we lie 

    like moist kindling under the covers and the world 

    is just as it was, only more so.
    Over the fields, first mists of September 

 

    unfurling their aprons the colour of iron.
    Rooks like black static. A breeze heckling 

    silver out of the grass until the lawn
    is a carpet of knives. It is my job to cut and split 

 

    and ransack the nave of each bird, 

    which his mother will bake with orange juice 

    and honey. Six birds in a wheel 

    on a willow pattern plate, a carousel

    of pigeons, their bald, glazed wings 

    like tiny flippers, and what meat there is 

    latticed by shot. It is 1978. I am eighteen.
    The year Sweden outlaws aerosols,
 

    and Markov, Bulgarian defector, is assassinated 

    with a poisoned umbrella tip, and Egypt 

    makes peace with Israel and war begins 

    in Afghanistan and a man more than twice my age 

 

    teaches me that the body
    is its own reward. And these days 

I sleep right through the minor disruption 

of my lover's shower, and when I wake
 

he's at work—in jeans, perhaps, but shaved—

with his feet on the table and a folder 

of case notes before him and his gun, unbreakable 

heart, in a holster against his ribs. The hungers 

 

of the body, says the preacher, always 

lead us astray. So let us pray.
Outside, the red crumble of tail lights 

down Linienstraße. A great city

and its troubled history under rain.
The whole of Europe under the same rain.
A waver, I once read, is a young tree 

left uncut during the clearing of timber. Rain,

somewhere, loosening its clothes to play wanton 

in the fields; rain drumming its fingers 

on the green tiers of the trees. The loneliness 

of rain that has come so far
 

touching only one leaf. And where rain is falling
where there are no leaves, a greater loneliness.
Every word for what we are 

leads us back to this. Human,
 

from the Latin humus, meaning earth. Flesh, 

from the Greek, related to sarx, meaning earthly; meaning, 

of man set adrift from the divine. Every word 

for what we are brings us back to the dirt. So yes, I say,
 

let us pray. Let there be buttons
abandoning their buttonholes. Let tongues unbuckle, 

let watches, let belts. May small change fallen 

from pockets be forgotten, never found.
 

And shy flags of hair swing loose. Storms 

inside strokes of wind. The world is full 

of alchemy, so let there be questions 

and demands. Small talk, dirty talk, language 

 

in all denominations. Let keys drop and fingers find 

every latch and lock and legs peel free 

from the sheer, long throats of stockings. Let hearts 

be up to their necks in longing.

May jackets and shirts turn inside out; 

may the body—in rooms specially rented, 

in cars, on tables, in single beds
on Sundays. Body, believed to be related to Old Norse 

 

buthker, meaning box; as in, coffin 

that goes into the earth. And when the virgins 

go down may they go down like heavy crops 

go down before the cutter—without choice 

 

and ripe with rains and sugar. Jesus, abandoned 

on the cross, alone in his alcove, turns 

from green, back to blue, back to red, 

while in its tank that single tetra forms perfect
 

circles on the water simply by drifting 

to the surface and kissing what imprisons it.
Why, if desire is so perilous, are we given a god 

so obviously human, with an athlete's body, lean
 

and well-worked; a god whose loincloth is slipping, 

pulled down by its own slight weight 

over one hip; who has, still, despite all 

that's been done to him, such beautiful hands.
 

A god whose crown is askew, 

whose hair needs washing, whose wounds 

will become the most terrible of scars.
A god who may well
 

have desired a woman who made desire pay.
Who may well have been her lover.
Who dies with his arms wide open.

 

[Jude Nutter, 'Disco Jesus and the Wavering Virgins in Berlin, 2011', from Dead Reckoning]