Geof Huth and Tom Beckett


The Pornographer’s Assistant


I rested in the sweet light of her skin, whispering,
“Ich bin ein Bananafisch.” She turned away, muttering something
about the “ennui of ani.” Sehr gut. Sehr gut.

(I said “beer gut”
to the Sour Kraut.
He doesn’t listen.)

Everything was interminable in fleeting ways, how she rose
to speak and, speaking, said, “Alors, la même chose,
toujours la même chose,” the petals of her words descending.

(I hover,
in front of myself,
speaking his words.)

She said, “I hear someone speaking outside the window,”
but she didn’t say “window.” She said “fenêtre.”
I could hear the circumflex floating in the air: “speaking his words.”

(I am the widow
of his sentiments,
the object of his lust.)

Abject, and lacking any possibility, she took the last
scented mint from the nightstand, a circular being, and laid it
on her wide tongue, going suddenly dumb from the tingle.

(The fiction
I am to him
is his taste.)

“Pentimento,” she said, she could not be entered, everywhere,
even as I entered her, I had to bury all of her, every eye
of her, I discovered her asleep, among me, alone.

(I am a hole
into which
I have been thrown.)

“En la mañana, por favor,” she implored, before switching,
“encore, encore.” This was before her eyes shut, before
she turned from green to blue, from dreaming to dreamt.

(What is this I
am climbing out of?
Have I been possessed?)

She whispered in her sleep what she whispered to me
through her dreams, and it was the sound of breathing. I was quiet
enough almost to make out her sense, so sweet.

(He speaks of me as
a code to crack when
I’m really just his coda—tail.)

She existed as the tiniest story of me, dust under my fingernail,
a shredded bit of apple, the cotton napkin. Though I wipe
her lips, her words remain: “Toujours,” she says, then “Only two?”

(Always already
I am two:
Voice and Body.)

When I slept, I stopped watching her, and listened
to her dreaming, the whistling of her nose, a mumbled “perche.”
She asked why, I answered because.

(Don’t disparage binaries.
They are the engines
of dialectical thought.)

I dreamt her into me, dreamt myself into her,
the suddenness of it, all at once, a breath, a gulp
of water, the warmth of oneness, and blood rushing everywhere.

(“The identity
of experience.”
Yadda, yadda.)

“Mes yeux, mes oeufs, meilleurs,” she mumbled.
There was no substance to her, no sound.
She waved her arms in the air as if to say something.

(Are you all
of my Others?
Whom do we caress?)

Spooned into me, she fell as we fell, together,
into blackness, backwards into words,
and she held on.

(Through the contagious mirror
you found
a window into me.)

She waited for morning through the night,
wind pushing through windows, reflected
in mirrors and vases, caught in her eye.

On these surfaces
I see only him
roaring through me.

She stepped out (parenthetical) of herself, a puddle
of paraffin rocking in the cup of her palm, she saw
herself and said, “Ergo ego echo.”

His syllogism.
His self-referentiality.
His syllabus.

If she were a siren and I were asleep,
we would alight, the structure had, a method of learning,
winter teeth, fracture, fractious, fraction.

Do we see only our own
instabilities in one another?
Are we a fucking allegory?

The replacement for cock is banana, the replacement
for cunt is apple, we aspired to perspire, together,
one beast rocking itself furiously back to sleep.

Unshuttered, he is shuddering into
her (into me). He is shattering
our resemblance.

She was the shadow beneath me, and I moved
through shadow, into her, into darkness and warmth.
If the lights had come on, the bed would have been empty.


Geof Huth has been creating poetry of all kinds for over thirty years, and he expects to get it right sometime soon. In the meantime, he writes constantly about visual poetry and other matters at his blog, dbqp: visualizing poetics, and occasionally something like a book (like Longfellow Memoranda) or a chapbook (Gingerbread) of his appears in space.

Tom Beckett's selected poems, Unprotected Texts (Meritage Press) is available from Small Press Distribution and Amazon. His This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day, as well as 3 volumes of E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S interviews, are available from The Otoliths Storefront at Lulu.

 
 
 
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