ANDREW FOGLE

B. splendens

Oil-neon, leonine, from the dark clotted thing it was,
a jarred betta pushed by a child’s accident against a mirror
tumesces. It is exactly the libido of an anchorite unexpected
in the tent of a perfumed eunuch: effulgence in excess
of the salt-mud clockwork of gods or genes, some eruption
kinking the cool smooth vectors of theology or biology,
a splendid allergy that wells genital and embarrassing
for the kid and the monk.

So when, in the aquarial brack of our beds,
some hand, or look, or word swells up
the piscine origami of glands –
mad ventricles flushing,
bruise-hued tissues
blooming laryngeally
something like:
I like you a lot-
You should not
push it back;
Desire is a fighting fish.

Irish Elk Sonnet Fragments Recovered from Shannon Basin Pleistocene Peat

Great sloping stag-thing that knew the bogging
tendency of lust’s rampant allometry: Megaloceros
giganteus, doom-antlered, direly love-racked, how onerous
was the added branching weight of knowing

that your line was fast collapsing under
the thorn-crown gravity of pleasure, every buck’s arch-necked, sated
bellow mounting deadly living stone upon your head? Heaney’s crated
air missed the point of skulls in muck-butter.

Easter 1994

Peeping
stops. Amniotic
liquor cools around
the egg-tooth whose
subtle mineral sawings
quell. A little boy breathes
the incandescent damp
of a bedroom incubator,
the avian forge already
smelling teary. Dare he
break the seal of foam
and shell and risk the
mother’s rude, rural
contempt of runts?
The historical
(not the Synoptic)
Magdalene offers
her bosom, to tell
of a morning spent
ear-pressed against
other stubborn
calcium: how
she too broke
over futile prayer,
the cruelty of
a parent,
a failed
pipping.

Anamnesis

I remember the one time flying through the Realm of the Forms in a Boeing
somewhere over Ohio (the neoplatonists couldn’t have known.) Bobbing
nimbus-buoys plastic-glinted the shallow gold of speech
and debate trophies: horses, rocking horses, geese,
masculinity, Communism. The perfect sonnet ducked
near my overwing window and I readied a pen. Just
as I’d scanned to the volta, the Idea of a Potato
struck an engine, bisecting diaphanously. Our capable pilot, to
avert disaster, landed us in Saint Louis in less-than-ideal
weather. Waiting under a cold front for some relative, dull
and hungry, I went to the airport Jack-in-the-Box for
curly fries and was told that they only sold half-portions.

Ozarks Hermetic

A yarbman mules through a crick’s squirrelled
hickories, trundling spunkwater. morels
bundled against the depredations of snipes,
black howlers, and baldknobbers, fighting
nights’ visions of alligator husbands, white
spooklamps, hellbenders bipedal in moonlight.
Paused by a spring cave named mongrelly,
cold lime gospel and pagan in the shade,
he considers the incestuous albinisms which dwell
beneath, and shudders again, wading
farther from the city and the blind, blanched, cold
creeping things that haunt its karst souls.