Monster [It's possible I misconstrued you]
By Brook Emery
It’s possible I misconstrued you,
laid too much emphasis on the uniqueness of a birth,
failed to acknowledge circumstance could corrupt, sustain;
I indulged myself in accusations against an absolute.
I don’t believe what I then believed. You are not responsible
for Leibniz or the Lisbon quake, for the twenty-six-eyed
and sixty-arsed box jellyfish, that the cosmos
is shaped like a soccer ball; or for the dosido
of right and wrong around the garden bed.
You are not the monster I thought you were,
not by definition or necessity the one immutable.
You are a creator caught in a creator’s net, in fact
a creature. Every horror has its own pathology,
the disease infects the flock. Prey present as predators,
the malefactors replicate even as the angels
experiment with cures. Each encounter pulls against reductive story,
says I will not, I am just (an instant, an instance),
and reference skews on maps not drawn to scale.
I know saintliness exists. It’s all around me.
My next door neighbours in their simple modesty,
the lady down the street who is always
helping someone older than herself. Even the slow
judicial process conceives it natural to be better
than we are. I’m trying to shoo the gloomy birds away
but crows repeat about me on the lawn; and the vulture
and the kite, the cuckoo and the owl: should I have given up the ghost
when I was drawn from the womb?
Brook Emery, "Monster ("It's possible I misconstrued you")" text from Uncommon Light, Five Islands Press, 2007; audio from Uncommon Light, Audio CD, River Road Press, 2007: by permission of River Road Press and the poet. Copyright © 2007 by Brook Emery.
Source:
Uncommon Light
(Five Islands Press, 2007)
