Gabriel Gudding

How I Caught My Cold

And then, O God, I saw the Norsemen
rounding the bar with heavy way on.
	Between the sodden buoys, the skerries
	and cape: they came on,
		their sail down,
		they were really rowing.

And when they docked in a froth of Turkish composite arrows and 
	faked hemp
we tried to torch the pier with pans and turf-oil,
but the dicky sun went orange in their steel-pinned strakes
		and the dock-snot fiddled tan
		in the tarred pighair of their caulking
		before I went limp
		and remembered no more.

And remembered no more until I came to,
when they told me, when they gathered round to say,
that in disembarking those boomsail tubs, their malodorous
		close-quarter gear, the fur, their murderous glare
		was all too much for our battle-bred dogs,
		which, albeit small, did not fight fair.

Thus at that inglorious and rainy pier,
on our slick feet and among the abandoned sod-bombs
no one fought fair--least of all the Norsemen.
It was a classic contra vires acrium:
		there was nothing worser. No one remembers
		exactly in what order
		they performed the rapine and the murder-- 
		whether rapine then murder, or vice versa.

We only gathered that it was over,
how here and there the dogs lay punctured, be-dog-headed,
how the pigs were in the doldrums, the chickens
		looked like little pills, and that
		Piers noted foxes had come out of the hills
		to plunder our unburned larders.

But the order: we wanted to know the order:
Whether murder, rapine, rapine, murder, and then their tea, or porter?
Such questions we considered on the pier
		among the loose arrows and the stuck ones,
		until Eadweard the Oxherd cleared his throat
		and made it clear they had seized my book.
		They had seized my book. He made this clear.

And I tell you, John,
My eyes rolled out to where I thought Frisia was,
where the whiskery daughters of the ursi albi
		had taken my Babs,
		somewhere between the iceblink and the blasentang.
		And I longed for the shotgun
		
and the Armalite--the cool heft
of the air-cooled rifle: sniper's Browning
with lead butt: for the dum-dum, the hollow point.
		I was tired of the town and the town's talk,
		of my butt under the harrow-- 
		I wanted a shotgun and a tomahawk.
		I wanted battle.

I gazed out
into the gesso and the gold leaf
of all that clinks and festers in the sea-- 
		the cowry and geoducks, pollos del mar,
		the cheap and ridiculous wars
		of groupers and blowfish,
		
crabs who dangle
like so many teens
among the shingled cod,
		puffins and terns
		zipped up tight as freezer bags,
		gulls resting on seashine
		like so many wedding rings-- 

And I thought of my God
as a sunk cannon blooming with rust
among impertinent nurse sharks and tiger sharks.
		And so gazing into all of it-- 
		into the great sea's bric a brac, the daybook
		of the Northeast, and the girdle book
		of the bladderwrack-- 
		
and of the sealion heads that looked
like sealion butts--I dove in
to scan the wracked floor of the watermark
		for my fides
		and eruditio.
		(I, ahh--I went a little nuts.)

I swam for about a half hour and stood:
Waist-deep, penis shrunk to a bolt,
kinked bridles of seagrass wrapped broken
		on my knees in knots: I'd been following the Norsemen
		without a boat. Feeling stupid,
		though somewhat like a stud,

I strode up on the strand and stretched.
Villagers were bringing me coats.
	Well beyond my bailiwick,
	I had hunted in the waters till I came out sick:
		Realizing what I was,
		I bent down in the sand
		and made some notes.

---

Gabriel Gudding is a lecturer at Cornell University. His 1500-word insult poem, "A Defense of Poetry," is in Conduit (#9). Other poems are forthcoming in other journals. He lives in Ithaca, New York, with Irish poet Mairead Byrne and their two small companions, Marina and Clio. photograph by Mairead Byrne contents | previous | next