The Corpse Flower

New and Selected Poems

Bruce Beasley

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806785
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Corpse Flower brings works from Bruce Beasley's first four award-winning collections together with twenty-five new poems, organizing them around the metaphor that gives the book its title: an enormous tropical bloom that reeks like carrion, and around whose three-day florescence "dung beetles & flies & sweat bees swarm /... pollen gummed all over / their furred feet." The corpse flower serves as a figure for Beasley's coming to terms with birth and death, fecundity and decay, the illusion of death, and the flourishing of the rare and beautiful out of the materials of the decayed. The Corpse Flower traces a spiritual pilgrimage, weaving autobiography into a larger meditation on the materials of language and of the life of the spirit. Beasley's is a deeply physical spirituality - as he writes in one poem, "the soul's / impossible to tell / from the objects of its appetite." Throughout these poems, family mythology, as well as religious and mythic narrative and iconography, become occasions for extraordinary meditations on the physicality of birth and death, beginnings and endings. This substantial selection of Bruce Beasley's work, written over a twenty year period, offers the opportunity to experience, page by page, a poet's evolution, and to follow a unique, creative mind as it reaches, through interrogations of faith, science, and art, toward some form of resolution - a resolution increasingly represented by the beauties of language itself. On Summer Mystagogia "These brilliant poems, often both mythic and demotic, powerfully initiate the reader into a world at once marred and yet suffused by the signs and wonders of an 'irresistible grace.'... A wonderfully resilient and hard-won poetry of witness." - Boston Review

INITIALS

from Spirituals (1988), The Creation (1994), and Summer Mystagogia (1996)

forerunner—

Witness

I

That’s where your father

had his accident, my father

mumbled, pointing

through the cracked windshield

to the dropoff where he’d plunged that car

into spiky shrubs thirty feet below.

But I knew

anyway from my mother’s

enraged voice on the phone,

then from the barred

psychiatric ward,

it was no accident.

That gesture—his finger tracing

vaguely all he couldn’t talk about—

comes back to me now, through

Caravaggio, where Christ

guides the apostle’s pointing finger

with sexual tenderness

into the smooth, apparently permanent

gash in his breast.

Through his one sentence, my father’s

voice was rough with such regret—

for having tried, or having failed,

I couldn’t tell—

I only knew his scarred

arm on the steering wheel

scared me, and his sweet

whiskey breath, and the broken guardrail

stabbing its twisted metal

over the skidmarks still there down the edge . . .

I thought: he must have tried to make it stop.

But I didn’t want to know,

didn’t want to watch

his headlights scoop out that canyon

or the darkness fill it back up,

or his lips, lit by a cigarette stub,

try to tell me what had gone wrong

and I didn’t say a thing

as he twisted the radio dial

from gospel to Muzak to static,

coughed his dry, frightened cough

and watched me from the side of his eye.

The torn seat squeaking on its hinges

was the only sound as we rumbled

down the brick streets of Macon

where I watched his back

disappear through glass

doors throbbing with dancing bottles.

2

In Caravaggio’s painting, the voyeur

apostles throng

so close around Jesus and Thomas,

gazing hard as the fingertip

slips into the pucker of wound.

They all want to know what it’s like

inside the cut, risen body,

but they’re scared of what

the touch might do; it’s assuring to watch

the curious one

penetrate first. But Thomas

is tense, his forehead ridged,

his throat tight as he goes

deeper into the fresh

opening just under the skin—

he’s mortified, like one

admitted where he can never belong.

Still, Caravaggio has torn

the shoulder seam

on his red robe, which means

he’s as human as Christ,

available to damage too. My father

died a year after that ride, and now

I don’t even know

where the road he showed me

is. At fourteen, I closed my eyes

and let his old Nova

carry me home,

the Ocmulgee River’s

smell of mud-clogged kudzu and swampgrass

washing over my father’s Jack Daniels.

He turns back to me now,

when I want him to, lifts

his shaking hand to the window,

and points again down the cliff,

and the flesh-

colored robe opens, and the finger

pierces just under the heart,

and the hand with its nailhole coaxes

the bewildered witness in.

The Creation of Eve

We lay a long time in the brine of my blood,

Father,

this other

hacked from my flesh,

her side by my gashed side.

Strangers—

How ...