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Voluntary Servitude
By Mark Wunderlich Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2004 Mark Wunderlich
All right reserved. ISBN: 1-55597-408-2
Chapter One
AMARYLLIS
after Rilke You've seen a cat consume a humming bird, scoop its beating body from the pyracantha bush and break its wings with tufted paws before marshaling it, whole, into its bone-tough throat; seen a boy, heart racing with cocaine, climb from a car window to tumble on the ground, his search for pleasure ending in skinned palms; heard a woman's shouts as she is pushed into the police cruiser, large hand pressing her head into the door, red lights spinning their tornado in the street. But all of that will fade; on the table is the amaryllis pushing its monstrous body in the air, requiring no soil to do so, having wound two seasons' rot into a white and papered bulb, exacting nutrition from the winter light, culling from complex chemistry the tints and fragments that tissue and pause and build again the pigment and filament. The flower crescendos toward the light, though better to say despite it, gores through gorse and pebble to form a throat-so breakable-open with its tender pistils, damp with rosin, simple in its simple sex, to burn and siphon itself in air. Tongue of fire, tongue of earth, the amaryllis is a rudiment forming its meretricious petals to trumpet and exclaim. How you admire it. It vibrates in the draft, a complex wheel bitten with cogs, swelling and sexual though nothing will touch it. You forced it to spread itself, to cleave and grasp, remorseless, open to your assignments-this is availability, this is tenderness, this red plane is given to the world. Sometimes the heart breaks. Sometimes it is not held hostage. The red world where cells prepare for the unexpected splays open at the window's ledge. Be not human you inhuman thing. No anxious, no foible, no hesitating hand. Pry with fiber your course through sand. Point your whole body toward the unknown away from the dead. Be water and light and land-no contrivance, no gasp, no dream where there is no head. VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE In a valley in Wisconsin there is a graveyard where the graves are flooded by spring.
You say, Don't wreck me, and I say I won't, but how can I know that? To see a man in shackles, how you feel about that, depends on whether the servitude in voluntary The bodies are intact in their gloves, soaked in a bath of ice. Hair a net around them. Music does not console me. Words in books rise up and scatter. A friend told me of a snake that came into her room one night. The house was in Pennsylvania. She lived there alone. In the dark she could hear it-dry, slipping onto boards like a stocking rolled from a leg. It retreated when she turned on a light. There was a dark hole at the floor. Residents disagree about the cemetery. Some think to say the bodies are intact is wrong. To suggest that there is anything abnormal is unfit thinking. I have a new story to tell you. In it, there is a girl. It's a story a friend once told me. Some forms of servitude are voluntary. Some shackles too- Some you can remove. But this story- you start in the middle, in the thick and marrow of it. I think you'll like it. Let me tell it to you. Lying side by side. In the dark. LETTER TO J. With your hand over my mouth, your body on my back, I still attempt refusal. In my head, the tattered curtain falls to the stage, the actors are over iron-scorched costumes to the laundress, the carts are wheeled away with their props of paste. Your mother interests me. Today I think of her lying in the cool recess of your plantation home, splayed in her negligee upon the candlewick spread, her six French boys on their knees around her, a rosary clicking off sins bead by bead. Once you told me of the house maid who spilled her change on the front porch-money she'd pinched from your pockets in the laundry. You knelt to help her gather it up. The money didn't matter to you, though her small revenge clings to you like a burr. I pretend you are the father. I am the child stepping into the bath. My pale limbs texture with gooseflesh and the water is too hot. When I call, you come to me, wash my small body, which once was your body and curled in the smallest cell of your sex. You handle me gently but with contempt. Your teeth have left their impress on my thigh. when you hurt me, I press my face to the pillow and do my sums. Two wings and a feathery heart do not add up to bird. Fathers and sons continue to multiply.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Voluntary Servitude by Mark Wunderlich Copyright © 2004 by Mark Wunderlich. Excerpted by permission.
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