Calling the Water
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, PEN America features a poem by Tyler Brewington.
Calling the Water
That’s the phrase you use when it runs out
words by which you indicate your lost abundance
you’d like to exercise your right
to have it back, to say mine is used up
now I need yours
I need you to remember and accept
the provisions made for this
there is a storehouse
somewhere under a mountain, I need you
to flip the switch or open the gates or otherwise
do what you do when you bring it to me
And there follows a great many sighs
a great many complexities, a great shuffling, a rusty heaving
You get it
I myself am a tall drink of it
like most people born in the desert
my first experience of the divine came in the form of a fish
curling up at the sides, waving its red head and tail
in my palm where I had placed it as a way of asking
though I didn’t have to ask, it could and would tell
that I was fickle, false, in love
often passionate, seldom dead
I grew, explored the interior
under the blanket with a flashlight
I craved benevolent indifference, I understood things
from outside could come inside me
really kill around in there
interest in dolphins had given way to interest in men in foamed neoprene
many sex lessons buried beneath the sex pyramid
had more to do with death than with the problem
the problem of chronic scarcity
showtunes and other art I disliked
but would suffer in exchange for orgasms
I was thankful for labels
an abstracted vegetable floating in a white field
was exactly the feeling I wanted meals to evoke
a time of pure surface
I had faith in people
the way Earth has Moon
the way a cat’s named Kitty
the way god trusts me to know sin
and self-punish
perhaps the limits of my erotic imagination are boring and predictable
but I will die grateful
for the adolescence I got to have offline
that pines sometimes obscured the view
was entirely the point
perhaps it is all for the best
how the rose garden interrupts the deep creepiness
of the trees, how the gulch interrupts the city
once I stepped barefoot into something flyblown
it was a great lesson in inattention
a tent encampment and a discarded pair of pants interrupts
types of spinning: wet, dry, dry jet-wet, melt, gel
and electrospinning, and with these and a spinneret
you form multiple continuous filaments
that’s where extrusion fibers come from
the everlasting shittiest fabrics
many people don’t care to think much
about clothes, I’m sorry for them
I care a great deal about clothes
so much so that it’s strange I never learned to make any
money with which to buy them
efficient and generous ways to provide them to people who need them
that’s real power
it’s embarrassing and painful
how scary I am in the right outfit
moving with purpose into the forest
where I pick up a bundle of sticks
and shape the bundle into a beast
and breathe life into the beast
and love and celebrate the beast
lead it burning and clacking into a heterosexual
wedding where people run screaming from horseradish
where I have been making small talk about water
because it is a distant and polite disaster
and aside from the thing with the beast
I’m not trying to bleach anyone’s coral
if you know what I mean
what I mean is that the magic of the box canyon
isn’t the echo, though that’s great
it’s amplification, not replication
you get the one good one
_______________________________________________
Once a week, the PEN Poetry Series publishes work by emerging and established writers from coast to coast. Subscribe to the PEN Poetry Series mailing list and have poems delivered to your e-mail as soon as they are published (no spam, no news, just poems).