Minotaur
 
 

A prayer:

Inside a stand of mango trees
home to spiders rot and shade
you lie before me taut and ashen
pumice-flesh bound in coarse
hessian cerements. Archaic
and naked photographic flash
burns my mind with murderous
suns I am under the house in the
cool with no memory of bottles
or hands or ancient brown reliquaries
filled with every kind of nail screw
fragrant polishing oil barley sugar
shellac or sweet meat. A mouse
feeds somewhere in the dark night,
cutting ambrosia for food. I do not
know the colour of the mouse. I
have fallen into the sea or sky. A
round of applause. A television.
I know the silence of ground zero.
A dream without sleep.
Barefoot and crouched over your
corpse, I cut. Into your chest I
pour a mixture of warm menstrual
blood the froth of rabid dogs
aromatic gums the tongue of a
corpse-fed hyena and the fresh green
leaves of plants on which I had spat.
You return in a wave that takes me
downstream for days, fearful of
dark expanses that take and do not
give. Photic excitation brings the
journey to an end giving way to
recollection and volumes of photographs
filled with every lunchroom we had ever
spent time in and outside if you look
closely you can just make out through
the window behind me the streets
filled with the bodies of hanged soldiers
and together we sigh and say oh yeah
and recall how families were always
walking around gingerly in an attempt to
avoid the ejaculate and piss. We talk of
sleep and burnt-out railway carriages
and departure lounges and the mist and
rain of that morning at Varanasi when we
typed the execution orders and threw them
into the waters of the Ganges and bought
prayers from holy men and I can still smell
your skin and I resign myself to the truth
that it is only in my dreams that you are
alive. Amen.
 
 

Paul Hardacre

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