"Oh brother!" I say when you remind me
of that fight at work. Years ago, you were smelling
the roses on someone's desk, their blooms surprising
in the crushing scale and noise of the power
plant, its pulverized coal covering everything, black dust
filling the fine lines in any ungloved hand. For a moment
I can see your nose and lips at the edge of the petals --
so many times you have been sultry and dark:
on that path in Florida, the purple riot of an orchid
falling like a sexual being toward your cheek, though
your face turned only to me. The roses were huge
and just beginning to open, and you were homing
in on their color and scent when Jones came up behind
you and said "why don't you smell this fucking
flower!" and when you turned, he pushed you back,
his hands flattening against your chest, his greater
size and weight crushing you into the desk, until
you moved in all those ancient and practiced moves
of striking snake and flashing heron, and pinned him,
harmless, cursing, to the veneer. Later you told the boss
you wanted a meeting, and he said 'Ok, on Monday,
we'll get that Indian', as if suddenly your equally dark
skin were allied with his, but that wasn't what you meant,
to attack some member of a tribe, but just to reply
to the injustice of an individual. By Monday
Jones was already in jail for assaulting his family
over the weekend. He had gone home in a fury
over the subtleties of those roses. You could never say
to him what it meant to stand there opening
to the garden of yourself as the petals always open
toward the interior that is always sexual, always erotic,
so that Jones, moved by the woman in himself, toward
you or toward the flowers, had to harden to fist and curse.
How else extinguish the woman who lives within a man,
or the man who lives with a woman. For by saying
"Oh brother!" I too have turned the word of fraternity
into something of a curse. A soft exclamation of woe
in which I can glimpse for a moment my brother
lying in an ancient swamp, dead by his own hand.
 
 

Rebecca Seiferle

>>>Black Water

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