PAIGE ACKERSON-KIELY
The One-Life Theory Reading Samuel Beckett
I was shy.
Always the feral animal quivered to be touched
and one stroke of lightning smote me.
It was electric. No
static
no, no it moved a dozen
leaves in the throat.
I have seen almost nothing.
My what-have-you-seen monitor
is snow-full, heavy without child
and there is beauty I know it
not breathing. Coo-me.
No, no.
No beauty don’t touch me
with those decibels. With frequency
a raccoon lumbers into the road
(have you heard this one)
a raccoon lumbers into the road
and saws the lumber in two
and his teeth are diamonds, no
no, his teeth are on my arm
and I am shaking I said
I am shaking my very own arm
+++
The One-Life Theory Where No One is Excluded
Good God take your long cold look
like they do in the moving pictures.
I was a study in ash,
so lightly I breathed and the candle was
snuffed.
The thought of your hands is holding a bird
and snipping the tip of its beak with a nail clipper.
The thought of your hands on me
is eating what is clipped. The acolyte’s hair
in his eyes.
I must, dear Lord, in your robes upon robes
I move my hands in and out as though they are curtains
and you are one big day,
I must bring to my lips the hush of you
silent because you are looking so close
as I studied, Christ almighty, I bent over
as a woman knows well to-do
harangued, coat-hanged, I looked
so beautifully down for a while
the trash on the ground was my friend
+++
Culpability
Did I not love the beast, the nostril of the beast, fanning a woman in her
Easter dress. Did I not touch the pond and in doing so the flagella, the
tail of the tadpole, the sperm, did I not barricade the sperm; past
this level of initial sadness do not ascend. Did I say no to the child,
nononono no. Stay where you are in your clean dream with a balloon affixed
to your delicate wrist. Did I not weep into my wrist, weep into the wrist
as though it were beige office furniture. Was I not holding in my heart
the sigh and the pink slip. I was wearing the slip, the fabric atop wishing
to cling as one would to the edge of a crevasse. And the big damn holes,
everywhere, I stumbled inside, did I not, I fell as one falls into the word
love as one falls into the particular face of a word that does not smile,
the mouth is a line, the mouth is a trolley straight to the loading docks,
workers heaving boxes, the sky above failing cheer. Did you not love me
I did not ask. Have you never torn into the earth, ripped up the saw grass
as it imparts its honest reach. Are you not inclined to create a ruin for
the tourist. Take me to the pasture I am waiting for a sign. Blindfold me
and bind my hands and just leave me out there on a knoll.