Thomas Lux

The Devil's Beef Tub

There are mysteries--why a duck's quack
doesn't echo anywhere
and: Does God exist?--which
will remain always as mysteries. So
the same with certain abstracts
aligned with sensory life: the tactile,
for example, of an iron bar
to the forehead. Murder
is abstract, an iron bar to the skull
is not. Oh lost
and from the wind not a single peep of grief!
One day you're walking down the street
and a man with a machete-shaped shard
of glass (its hilt
wrapped in a bloody towel) walks towards you,
purposefully, on a mission.
Do you stop to discuss hermeneutics with him?
Do you engage him in a discussion about Derrida?
Do you worry that Derrida might be the cause of his rage?
Every day is like this,
is a metaphor or a simile: like opening a can
of alphabet soup
and seeing nothing but Xs, no, look
closer: little noodle
swastikas.

Terminal Lake

Although they know no other waters
and have no creation myths,
the fish don't like it here: no way out,
no river to swim upstream or down.
Terminal Lake squats there,
its belly filled by springs, oh rain
and ice and snow. It's deep,
Terminal Lake, and no one's gone to the bottom
and come back up.
All's blind down there, and cold.
From above, it's a huge black coin,
it's as if the real lake is drained
and this lake is the drain: gaping, language-
less, suck- and sinkhole.

Render, Render

Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle,
bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil
it down, skim, and boil
again, dreams, history, add them and boil
again, boil and skim
in closed cauldrons, boil your horse, his hooves,
the runned-over dog you loved, the girl
by the pencil sharpener
who looked at you, looked away,
boil that for hours, render it
down, take more from the top as more settles to the bottom,
the heavier, the denser, throw in ache
and sperm, and a bead
of sweat that slid from your armpit to your waist
as you sat stiff-backed before a test, turn up
the fire, boil and skim, boil
some more, add a fever
and the virus that blinded an eye, now's the time
to add guilt and fear, throw
logs on the fire, coal, gasoline, throw
two goldfish in the pot (their swim bladders
used for "clearing"), boil and boil, render
it down and distil,
concentrate
that for which there is no
other use at all, boil it down, down,
then stir it with rosewater, this
which is now one dense, fatty, scented, red essence
which you smear on your lips
and go forth
to plant as many kisses upon the world
as the world can bear!

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Thomas Lux holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Institute of Technology. His most recent book is The Street of Clocks (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). He lives in Atlanta. contents | next