Inverted Qualia

The pears look like words hanging off the trees, sentences with the wasps darting around the softer ones, the too ripe ones having dropped to the ground so the wasps are as low as your ankles, too. You could have to make a memory here with the sun white as a mixing bowl and at its zenith, so when you close your eyes on this day, it’s all inverted, the sky, yellow and the sun, just a big black space in the expanse. You would have to make a memory. It almost acts like a sickness, to lean back into this kind of past, one beveled by the land, a pilgrimage of horses always at the edge, or a pond deepening, getting wider, unescapably wider. The pears say Hold, say Cup, say Blood. With the wasps, they make that awful choir noise. You would have to eat all the pears in one sitting to be full of this place. You would have to make yourself sick with skin and juice and wasps’ hums, to make it all pure, essential, vital. The wasps say Miss, say Red, say Yes.

*

When you approach the pond, you come to the water with the sun behind you. The woman is suspended above the surface of the water, held as if hovering, by fishing line, invisible threads, so that her hovering appears authentic. She is naked, back against the surface, the incision running down her torso, and in the slight opening of her body there, eleven yellow butterflies have been glued to the puckered skin. The police have called you in, in all their graceless choirsong, to divine who, why. Because you know what the land can do to the soul. Because they know and you know the land has taken her soul. And all the phrases you hear from the land will tell you: in the folding of a blade of grass: what shoe and what size, man or woman: in the tying of fishing line to the bank’s trees: how steady the knots, how trained. You can see the art of murder in the cloudscape, in the way the sun opens her mail daily, how when she misses reading her letters, she turns and her back is gray, and the whole day is formed by her turning, by her letting go of the tantrum of living sounds, of harvest, of clinical depression. There is spirit in the way the dew forms on the woman’s skin, the gray pallor of her eyelids coated in the condensation of night killing itself in its endless repetitions. Or night giving itself to the conical mouth of light. When they finally cut her away from her suspension, they will not forego the telling of chemicals, of numbers. But you will only see, you will only comprehend, the way the light fell upon her exposed teeth, how each tooth once had its own tone against her tongue, how her voice will not be accurately recalled by the ones who knew her the most.

*

Wichita. Bel Air. Charleston. They are all just places. But you are called to be held accountable for answering the following: who, why. When they tell you where, you must go as if instinct has already formed its neck-knotting noose around your human throat. You must go, and you must give them somewhere to hunt. For man needs to be given direction. Man needs man to show him how fire is made, how grass can be folded by the foot. If the air is clean, you can smell its death like you are a dog who has been long-trained against his original master. The deathcall. The song of evermore. Whose pageantry do you answer to more: the living spaces carved of wonder, or the dead nothingness whittled of what must? Count on the wind to shift a certain seed from its frail coat. That is how nature forms herself: readily, willing, answering to no pride that isn’t her own. But you must look into the cracks of her breaking. You must equate damage with intent.

*

Why butterflies. Why yellow. Why there. These dreams, they are silver shreds of foil ripped into shape by a maker’s hands. The calcium content of bones. The porous way we understand each other. You could not have fought against your ribs any harder, that little pounding fist of meat keeping you running, keeping you still, keeping you in place.

*

To lift. To change the direction of how we move. You think this is part of the enterprise. If she, so exposed, were to be still, finally, then lifted: if she, so final, were to be one who freezes not in but above water, water which moves and is moved: if she were, if she is. And she is. Was this done to her in the nighttime or the day, in the light or in the dark. Who can say. Because the sun is a fist of nothing we can touch. And the night is spoken of as if it’s velvet, as if it is something we have touched even when we know we have not.

*

There is man within us and about. The consequences of what has been engraved in how we stand. You listen to the smallness of the water, how it flicks its tongue against the shape of its land. You smoke the cigarette though you know of lungs collapsing. For what is the body if not the body. You inhale the owl’s knowing. It is the ampersand between what happened here and what you are: a kind. A drowning victim will float, and now you see the inversion of that, forever, suspended above a drowning that did not occur but was positioned to have occurred in some way, in some kind of design. What is kindness. Is there a kind of kindness in the divine of divining.

*

So that the body does not answer who but tells only who is not anymore. So that the body who did becomes the answer of who. This is the who you seek when you siphon the melodies of fury. And the why: this is in the tracks of the butterflies’ linear legs worked precisely against the skin of who you know to be the body. Why incision. Why flight. Suspension is heralded by artificial means: why. The nightsky knows no softer music than the daysky. Why. Seldom secure in their movements, the stars take 36,000 years to cycle through their visible movements. And the awful moon, so much closer to our skulls, takes one sidereal month. The blood of the woman leaking painfully into the silver surface of the small pond. The blood of the woman. The blood.

*

The incision is a proof. It solves the revelation of life. Her womb: denounced under the widest of skies. Here is day, here is night. Here is cycle in its purest form. What is man but man. What is terminal but life. How many chrysalises does it take for one butterfly to live out its month: egg, pupa, adult. Sipping nectar through its proboscis. Supping life through its funnel which has to end up somewhere.

Erin J. Mullikin is the author of the chapbook, Strategies for the Bromidic (dancing girl press), and her poems, short fiction, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as The Yoke, Coldfront, Tammy​, Spork, and inter|rupture. She is a founding editor for the online poetry journal, NightBlock, and the small literary press, Midnight City Books.