Charles Harper Webb

A planeload of insurance salesmen, blown off course,

Discovers a tribe who believe an elephant-

In-the-distance is the same size as a gnat-in-the-eye.

This should cause trouble in a hunt. But tribespeople

Merely flick the pesky trumpeter away,

While the gnat – felled by clouds of arrows – feeds

The tribe for weeks. Faced by a lion, tribesmen run

Until its head is small enough to squish. Muscular

Warriors are found dead, pierced by mosquito-needles

Ear-to-ear. Everything here is as it seems.

The stick-in-water, drawn out, remains crooked

As a boomerang. Mountain and molehill are identical.

Tragedies that crush Americans – love’s waterbed

Popping, parents dropped into the scalding pot of age-

Require only that the sufferer walk away. “It’s not so awful,”

Tribal healers say. “With every step, troubles shrink;

Their howling dwindles to a buzz; their fangs shrivel to the size

Of pollen grains. Reach out. Brush them away. You see?”

Vampires and zombies, being liveliest, start first –

shambling, jogging, sprinting as their condition

permits. The freshly-dead in hospitals and funeral

homes totter to their feet (if they have feet)

and, embalmed or not, start running. Corpses claw

up from the ground, in the order they went in:

skeletons and rotted horrors hobbling and clattering,

stooping to pick up parts that fall. The long-dead

rise as human dust clouds, and run with the rest:

dark, stinking wind that crosses water as easily as land.

And now the oldest rise, the ones whose atoms

have mixed with everything. The Watson house,

the Pomeroy’s sweetgum, Dottie Tang’s azaleas

dissolve to let them out. Robert Ufman, Jan Nash,

Tiffany the Schneider Schnauzer disintegrate,

along with the still-solid dead, their molecules

joining the marathon that circles the earth

like a jet stream, until only I am left, remembering

how this always happens – how, in despair,

I pull a rib from my side, and begin again.

She judo-chops my Adam’s apple.

I pop her a straight right to the chin.

She clamps my ear in her bloody teeth, and tears.

I thrust my finger in her nose and rip.

She grips my balls and twists them off like knobs of bread.

I ram my fist up her, and gut her like a fish.

She grabs a cleaver, chops my legs off at the knee.

I seize a hacksaw; amputate hers mid-thigh.

She takes a sledgehammer and pounds my brain to jelly.

I take a jackhammer and smash hers into mush.

This goes on until only our eyes and hands remain

unscathed. This is the rule.

We must always be left some means to mutilate each other,

and some way to cry at what we see.