The Secret
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
― Benjamin Franklin
It wants to escape my mouth, this sieve.
My will is the colander in the sink. It holds nothing.
Your secret is not safe with me.
The best stories are the ripest,
or overripe, like a peach inedible,
suitable only for pies.
These are the stories that I must not tell.
I will tell them.
The problem, the peccadillo,
the sin, venial or mortal,
must be named and given a shape.
It itches to breathe and open its dead eyes,
like a new dragon,
ichor in its veins.
I want to be distributed
in all directions, instantly,
like an explosion.
Let the sun shine into the closet.
Hand me that shovel.
Having withstood too much,
having become strong-shouldered,
I am accustomed to labor.
Inevitable digging where once we buried.
Ask not for whom the heart breaks.
Its shards still aspire to pump.
The lungs wish to perspire:
gasping minnows on the dock.
The body’s functions are shattered, are secondary.
This vessel wishes to be emptied, to be let, of its blood.
That which is bottled wishes to be unbottled.
The paper bag contains a scream.
Will it pop?
The body without a soul is a simulacrum,
a mechanical owl on the shelf,
shuttered like a covered clock,
its heavy eyes finally closed.
The silence hungers for revelations.
Drunk after the faculty party,
George and Martha have an announcement to make.
It can be borne no longer.
Her manservant fled,
Faulkner’ s Emily has a rose,
and her bedroom door is barricaded shut.
Show me not what the pillow supports.
Home from the war,
and never home from the war,
a drop of blood glints on Hemingway’s knife.
It knows where it has been, and it’s not done.
Fitzgerald’s
hero would
benefit
from some
CPR
right about
now, about
now, about now.
The new owners,
the ones who don’t
know the stories,
will still use the pool.
The gun is loaded.
The gun wouldn’t be
in this scene
if it weren’t loaded.
Meanwhile, words must be spoken,
like on the first morning.
The writer opens the notebook.
Conflict is content.
Tumult is teasing.
Sighs make for good scenes.
Don’t take this standing.
Images that rattle here
like extra bones in the skull
should instead be nailed up
on the signpost in the town square.
Invite the townspeople
to interpret as they see fit.
Their gossip will reimagine it into
an amalgam of parts
no more ghastly than the original.
Does each family not harbor a zombie?
Some secrets are carried involuntarily.
One woman’s secrets on Venus
can be another’s burdens on Jupiter.
Provisionally slender,
I weigh five hundred pounds
on Jupiter, that gaseous giant,
24.79 meters per second.
Jupiter pulls with battleship chains.
A strong man strains here.
He buckles.
Before long, he flattens.
He pancakes down to deformed skin, jelly,
and a bit of bone meal.
He’s ready for soup.
Oh, the strain.
The heart beats as if a race were being run.
The race is in the veins.
The pulse can’t sustain such quickness.
Look at that man, that me.
That man, at the moment of conflict,
loses his nerve, his last nerves,
and chooses not to reveal.
No tells detected on this poker player.
He’s a four flusher.
He listens to what’s left of his heart.
Only he knows that he is incomplete.
I eye my own wrists in this forest of cleavers.
.
Dr. Andy Jones is a poet from Davis, California. He has taught for the English Department and the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis, since 1990, and is the host and coordinator of the Poetry Night Reading Series in town. Dr. Andy served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the City of Davis and is now the poet laureate emeritus. He has written four books and is currently working on a book of poetry, a collection of essays, a compendium of writing advice from notable authors, and a book on parenting children with special needs.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 