Kingdom Aborted

    As soon as they understood the molecular structure of water,
    they abandoned the idea of nature as allegory.

    But for all its beauty, its sad lyrical tenderness, province of melancholy over which poetry has reigned since the first blind bard--can it be enough, now, the lyric? Can it be enough, the sad I singing its sad song in sad nature, the pastoral song, enough?

    And yet the rain on the lake, the soft rain, the green lake, the brown swallows, lifting and diving, the world still beautiful, yet--

    * * *

    FRAGILE   FISHES   BROKEN   OCEAN

    Up the backside of Burlington, either side of the rails a treasure of illicit or
          abandoned junk--

    she picked words from a bag, laying them in order:

    Frame of a bicycle somebody stole, twisted car parts, a condom--

    of course it reflected her inner psyche--how depressed she had been.

    In the pond floated brightly colored detergent bottles, bobbing like decoys in the
          yellow foam.

    * * *

    And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it to his brethen:
    And they hated him yet the more.

    And he said unto them: Hear, I pray you, this dream
    that I have dreamed.

    I was singing my sad song in sad nature and it was louder
    and more sweet than all the other songs, for I was singing
    the heartbreak of the world.

    And behold, we were gathering bottles in the field, and
    the sumac bowed to me, and you also bowed to me, for
    I was singing the heartbreak of your world--


    O to be a head, a bodiless head, consciousness without form,
    eye without a lower heart--

    She kept returning to the poet's lyric, where she was as important as she'd ever be.

    * * *

    The old socialist spits at the poet's lyric.

    Bullshit! calls out the black-brown-Jew, in the café where the poet is reading her
          lyric.

    The children are so numbed by hunger they have no response to the poet's lyric.

    The other poets sneer at the poet's lyric: the "I", how passé!

    Whole revolutions breed and die, completely unchecked by the poet's lyric.

    The young feminist refuses to go to the reading, in protest against the male- centric
          lyric.

    The poet crumples up the poet's lyric: won't the boundaries of language ever be
          stretched?

    gray sky,
          gray rock,
    the white violeted grass,
          an undifferentiated weep-worn world--

    That is not the point, said the Professor. It's that we want the pastoral to mean
          something other than beauty--

    As the environmentalist demanded pollution curbs to protect the frogs, the developer
          sipped from his bottled water.

    ***

    And yet the rain on the lake, the soft rain, the green lake, the brown swallows, lifting and diving, the world still beautiful yet--

    In the dream you were sick, you were bleeding. The young men and women criss-crossed around you, their white coats flapping, files in their hands. You skulked into corners, you hid in the closet, the dark blood trickling down your calf. And then the something, coming from between your legs.

    You threw it out. You didn't want it. The interns came running. Lovingly they lifted it out of the can: Jellyfish, abortion, white-gum translucent— the deflated oceans and continents of the world.


    Butterfly Dream

    Six monarch butterfly cocoons
          clinging to the back of your throat--

    You could feel their golden wings trembling.

    You were alarmed. You felt infested.

    In the downstairs bathroon of the family home,
          gagging to spit them out--
    And a voice saying Don't, don't
          worry--

    You had wanted a change, didn't you?
    Art is through the throat.



    Bio Note
      Dana Levin's book In the Surgical Theatre was chosen by Louise Gluck for The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and will be out from Copper Canyon Press in October 1999. A 1999 NEA fellow, she teaches at The College of Santa Fe.

    Contents
    		 



     Dana

     Levin