YING ANG PHOTO BLOG

asunder

I. 

It was the bear who began it. Said, 
I’m getting out from under. 
I am not Bear, l’Ours, Ursus, Bär 
or any other syllables 
you’ve pinned on me. 
Forget the chateu tapestries 
in which I’m led in embroidered chains. 
and the scarlet glories of the hunt 
that was only glorious for you, 
you with your clubs and bludgeons. 

Forget the fairy tales, in which I was 
your shaggy puppet, prince in hairshirt, surrogate 
for human demons. 
I’m not your coat, rug, glass-eyed trophy head, 
plush bedtime toy, and that’s not me 
in outer space with my spangled cub. 
I’m not your totem; I refuse 
to dance in your circuses; you cannot carve 
my soul in stone. 

I renounce metaphor: I am not 
child-stealer, shape-changer, 
old garbage-eater, and you can stuff 
simile also: unpeeled, 
I am not like a man. 

I take back what you have stolen, 
and in your languages I announce 
I am now nameless. 
My true name is a growl. 

(Come to think of it, I am not 
a British headdress either: 
I do not signify bravery. 
I want to go back to eating salmon 
without all this military responsibility.) 

I follow suit, said the lion, 
vacating his coat of arms 
and movie logos; and the eagle said, 
Get me off this flag. 


II. 

At this the dictionaries began to untwist, 
and time stalled and reversed; 
the sweaters wound back into their balls of wool, 
which rolled bleating out into the meadows; 
the perfumes returned to France 
and old men there fell sweetly dead 
from a surfeit of aroma. 
Priests gave their dresses up again 
to the women, and the women ditched their alligator shoes in a hurry 
before their former owners turned up to claim them. 

The violins of the East Coast shores 
took flight from the fingers of their players, 
sucking in waltzes, laments, and reels, 
landed in Scotland, fell apart 
wih wailing into their own wood and sinew 
and vanished into the trees 
and into the gus and howls of long-dead cats 
and the tails of knackered horses. 
Songs crammed themselves back down the throats of their singers, 
and a billion computers blew apart 
and homed in chip by chip 
on the brains of the inventors. 

Squashed mice were shot backwards out of traps, 
brides and grooms uncoupled like shunting trains, 
tins of sardines exploded, releasing their wiggling shoals; 
dinosaur bones whizzed like missiles 
out of museums back to the badlands, 
and bullts flew sizzling into their guns. 
Glass beads popped off gowns and moccasins 
and fell on Italy in a hail of dangerous color, 
as white people disappeared over the Atlantic 
in a whoosh of pollution, vainly clutching 
their power tools, car keys, and lawn mowes 
which dove like metal fish back into the mines; 
black people too, recapturing syncopation; 
all flowers were suctioned budwise into their stems. 
The native peoples made speedy clearance work 
of cowboys and longhorns, but then took off 
westward instead, chanting goodbye 
to ancestral plains, which were reclaimed 
by shaggy mastodons and the precursors of horses 
and everywhere 
the children shrank and begn to 
drop teeth and grow hair. 


III. 

Well, there were suddenly a lot more flamingos 
before they in their turn became eggs, 
while people’s bodies reverted through their own 
flesh genealogies like stepping stones, 
man woman man, container into contained, 
shedding language and gathering themsleves in, 
skein after skein of protoplasm 

until there was only one of them, 
alone at the first naming; 
but the streetwise animals, forewarned 
and having learned the diverse meanings 
of the word dominion, 
did not show up, 
and Adam, iarticulate, deprived of his arsenal of proper nouns, 
returned to mud 
and mud itslelf became lava 
and lava the uncooled earth 
and the uncooled earth a swirl of white-hot 
energy, and the energy jammed itself 
into its own potential, and swirled 
like fluorescent bathwater 
down a non-existent wormhole. 


IV. 

I could end this with a moral, 
as if this were a fable about animals, 
though no fables are really about animals. 

I could say: Don’t offend the bear, 
don’t tell bad jokes about him, 
have compassion on his bear heart; 
I could say, Think twice 
before you speak. 
I could say, Don’t take the name of anything in vain. 

But it’s far too late for that, 
because you can’t read this, 
because you can’t remember the word for read, 
because you are dizzy with aphasia, 

because the page darkens and ripples 
because it is liquid and unbroken, 
because God has bitten his own tongue 
and the first bright word of creation 
hovers in the formless void 
unspoken

 ~ “The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return To Their Origins”, by Margaret Atwood

“I always wanted to ask people: “Are you in love? What are you reading?”“
~ Françoise Sagan