from Vincent
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, PEN America features an excerpt from Joseph Fasano’s book-length poem “Vincent,” which is based loosely on the 2008 killing of Tim McLean by Vince Li.
from Vincent
I saw this boy sitting next to me
with his duffle bag and it was yellow and orange
and I felt I was sniffing the edge of a photograph
in a crate
of my mother’s linens I felt
I was folding away a great flag
for the last time
under the bed my father died
at the foot of
vague as a twin
who’s survived his blonder half
it was so heady
I knew that form is deaf
that it is a great deafness radiating
outward
once I knew my mother was keeping
her body
from me to give
to that moonbaby my brother
so what did I do I went right out
and removed the ears from her precious
silver rabbits and hung them
over her eyes while she slept
to remind her who I am
they took me no I would say they
transmitted me in the front seat of a hearse
to a new house with no silo and no
moonbaby and no
idiotic rabbits or corn mash
do you know the look on an individual’s face
when he is about to say his own name
for the first time
after waking from a long sleep in fall
that is the mask I chose
when I met
Yolin and Betsy and Claire and Imago in the new rooms
on the third day
someone left my old bed
in the foyer like a girl clutching a locket
with a drop of my blood in it
I remember there was this bull
it carried its stupid face everywhere
and then Betsy told me
it had five stomachs
and that was the last straw
I let it fall asleep one night and then I lit its ignorant
limbs
on fire with tufts
of my own hair
do you know how much I had to work
to grow that hair again which felt so exact
to pull out and mash
between my teeth
while the matron was speaking like
perfect ignorance
when they found Roger in his stall he had tried to gnaw
the flames
he had not won
I don’t remember the difference
between the solstice and the
equinox but I remember one of them cleans me
and is for doing things like that
which help the system remain
once in the middle of a ball game
at school
I had all my clothes on and the ball
came ringing at me and I lifted
my hand to it and I knew I was holding it all together
do you know what I did
I caught the ball and I buried it
right there in the field like a bird
and I know what everyone
was thinking
why is he so good to us
they forgot themselves they tried
to get at the lode-stone of it
I’d captured and denatured
but I was a good wolflet
I gnashed at them
for hours seizing my hair
until it was all finally over
and they were safe again
and they could touch it
and touch it and touch it
I must have woken in the sacristy
because my hands smelled
like holy water
when I boarded that bus
it was all happening again and I knew
I was going to have to keep them safe
I remember
the first time and I know it is trite
I howled at the moon
I said
why not try this
why not let the season do its work
but there were horses
drifting through outlandish weather
their bodies blocking out the light
my sister came to me
and whispered
something into my temple
we were lying on a field of ice
I knew she did not eat I knew
she would not be caused
but she had her language too
like purblind garter snakes
flattened on a bare highway
during sleet
like the shadows in a deaf boy’s diorama
buried with him standing up in a cotton field
like butter pecan ice cream
you stick to the roof of your mouth when
you are falling asleep in August
it was the winter I stared at her hands
while they slept
they were like birthmarks on the bodies of the blind
the loudest call in a language of birds too tall
to remain with us
like the smell behind a Catholic nun’s
neck like counting the quasars
when you are young and lying
on the roof of your house until you can feel
clean enough to sleep
inside your family
I remember once I found
a mare giving birth under the porch
of a blind man’s home
she had fallen through
the cedar planks
a week before and that man was too damned
senile to believe that singing
anything other than some Algerian whore
he’d lain with beside a team of pintos
during the second world war
but I had heard
so there I was
standing in that ignorant room
with her
something had let her do it
I felt narrow
like I was buried under a river with a mask
of my mother’s hair on
with a mask of my own
under my arm
like a squire who has burned with the castle
for the last time
a mirror in a river
I walked up to her
I took her monstrance of a face in my arms
like shallow water
I don’t know if it was I
or the wind that lifted her forelocks but
what a mess her face was what a
traveling elsewhere
it was not here
I wanted to squeeze her face to make it stay
and maybe I did and maybe I helped her
but it just kept drifting
farther out like barge lights to sea
I saw her child trying to duck
into the clear cathedral of her milk
I went out into the field that night
with my mattress with a crate
of my sister’s dolls
she had carved down in the greatest hours
of her sickness
carved off the little nubs
of their breasts like ticks
on the feral or the dull
after they’ve walked through tall grasses
(in one of them she had inset
a winding long piece of yellow yarn
like a Romanov tapeworm)
she had shaved them down
under the ribs
with a carpenter’s plane
how many nights did I hear that music
humming from her room
like the breathing of an animal
on a heurtoir
but she had whittled them down well
I still don’t know what she did
to their hands that winter
they were like ammonia
whatever wetness darkened
the hind legs of that mare
I took the dolls
all twenty seven of them
and laid them out around my mattress
I peed in their hair
I made them listen to the woods breathe in
they looked like the song of an owl
right before death sitting there
in their ring
as though winter would slip them on
and be wedded to what it owned
when I woke I realized I’d walked
fifteen miles or so into the forest
and could have gone farther
had I not heard them rubbing up against one another
in that crate as I dragged it
had I not heard
the voices of their bodies
trying to give up their embarrassed mysteries
as when the light falls in your left hand
as it dismantles your zebra finch
the fleas on your back
holding up paper lanterns of your blood
by morning someone has always buried what remains
in the earth
elsewhere quietly
and language goes on
like a boy crouched in a hallway
casting no shadow
muttering into his underclothes
oil on his forehead
oil under his fingernails
I remember mathematics
how I would let the constellations do their best to me
when I discovered
dividing a thing by zero
makes it impossible makes it suddenly
elsewhere
I let this fact ripen in me
for days and seasons
let the wind hang in my veins
like a drag-net over a door
like a wasp nest in the hands of the dead
I knew the time would come
and then my sister
thinned herself and was lying there
in front of the family
like winter in a walnut coffin
I walked up to her when the deacon
was saying something unmathematical
and unfolded an enormous piece
of poster paper from my indigo
velvet jacket
(my favorite indulgence)
and taped it under her body
I had drawn a huge line across the top of it
like this
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