Two Skins

This is an assemblage of things, not all original to me. Credits at the end.

One

There was a man once who lived with his brother on a cold plain where they sold animal pelts and ate the meat of the animals, and sometimes he dreamed of his mother with grey plaits and bloodied arms.

Ten years after seven perhaps also brothers had cut his mother’s throat when the wind blew to stop your lungs sharp the man walked out into the cold and ate raw things till he reached a forest. He helped an old woman cut trees for a fire, and she told him how to find a wife. As she told him to he hid in icy branches till fourteen black feet touched the snow.

By the lake the last swan tore her breast’s flesh with her mouth till hands burst out into woman, slim and placenta black. She washed the blood with her sisters in the hot lake, and he took her dead feather cloak from where it smeared the ground grey-red. Returning to find her power gone and hung on some unseen tree she bared her gums to bite out his heart. Come out, man, I am a sow or pack of hounds to tear you up, she said.

The other birds flew off in ignorance. The man held up his bloody hands. We’ll marry then, she said, and when you see me pulling out down for pillows I’ll fly away. But the man pointed her to where seven men who wore the skins of hunters hung their hearts that burn from what their lives are on their tent pegs to cool in the night wind. Somewhere on the frozen plain too big for me to search there is red meat steaming to the black sky, he said. Take your skin to fly and my purse to carry the organs, and I’ll take your heart to draw you back, he said.

With a nail she scraped down her tight ribs, pulled the heart out beating and sealed the tear with spit. He put the heart in his other purse, she slipped her head beneath the white and was gone. He made a shelter from branches. Next morning the swan wife stood over him, red mess twitching in the bag. You can’t hide on the plain like in the forest, she says. With my wings and bird eyes I saw the tangled arteries. As I left they must have felt the tug because they are near, she said.

When the men were close he spattered their hearts on the ground and they fell. The last one told him where to find the rest of his mother, skin gone but her ghost collected in a purse. The man took the purse and wrapped his legs round the woman’s swan hips and she flew him to his mother’s grave. He shook a drop of blood from the purse and it steeped the frosty earth till her grey hand came through.

The mother joins the man and woman’s hands together and blood runs between them. I love you and cannot return your heart, he says. The woman runs her finger down his chest and pulls his heart to herself. See how easy it is, she says, softly. Choking at my red ripped chest I take her heart and hock it to the air, above the clouds where things no longer fall. Fly for it. She, gasping hollowed, throws my heart up the same way. We are bound, and our knees fall to the cold.

As they lay panting in the snow his mother trudged through deep drifts to the boiling lake. Onshore the last swan tore breast’s flesh with mouth till hands burst to woman, slim placenta black, blood washed, and she took the feathers and held up bloody hands. Come out say the bared gums and

the other birds fly away and

Give me your heart, she says, I’ll give you skin and you must retrieve two hearts that orbit somewhere above and you return them in this purse and I give you it back. Swan rolls black eyes, opens chest, gives heart to mother flies to where the hearts bob in clouds spewing steam to the stars till they frost over, takes them in her beak and swoops back white to mother is but mother will not give her it back and she

takes my mothers heart and she

and we bleed immobile on the snow breathing white in each other’s eyes and

my mother pale and choking comes and gives us hearts back but her heart is still in the air and my swan wife puts on skin and flies to my mother’s heart and the other swan heart and brings them all back in the purse and see now, all our hearts in the air and flies free in soft white and hard black and blood drips steams through stars and runs together spiral to tongues, lick freezing sweat from black ribs and eat her heart and wear her skin and

scatter feathers to the dark.

There was a man once who lived with his brother and his mother on a cold plain where they sold animal pelts and ate the meat of the animals, and sometimes he dreamed of his mother with grey plaits and bloodied arms, and sometimes when the hearth smoked to the black air he thought of the swan woman.



Every animal suggests some crushing misfortune that took place in primeval times. The fairy tale betrays man’s misgivings. But its prince preserves his reason, so that he can explain his predicament when the time comes and be set free by the fairy. An animal, however, is doomed by its lack of reason to inhabit its form for ever – that is, unless man, who is one with it through the past, discovers the redeeming formula and succeeds in softening the stony heart of eternity at the end of time.



Two

A sudden blow: the great ghost wings beat still;
his guts are stuffed with polaroids,
and they're all humiliating.
Above the staggering drunk, her thighs caressed,
sitting alone in the 4am darkness of a pitch-black theatre,
he holds her helpless breast upon his breast, his breasts are
hollow apartments with the finest quality furnishings
he explodes like fireworks on the stage

Sing,
your voice just won’t stop blooming.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
He wrote a play and you're the protagonist.
All the girls you wish you'd fucked make a guest appearance.
His eyes are twin mushroom clouds,
His feathers are unsuspecting cities.

You just won't believe the ending.
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Fly me home, Giant Swan.

Your heart's a diamond, buddy, what's the price?
How can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
Your skin
is cheap
and your hair
is shoddy.

A shudder in the loins. Skin draped over luxury chairs where you can watch the ballerinas kick and spin until you die. Being so caught up,
So mastered by this brute blood of the air you
strip
down to your vulgar skeleton.

It will sting like a raw sunrise when the black swan is gone.

Back at the resort, the curtains closed, you haven't left the room for two solid weeks. With a pound of cocaine under the bed where the call girls perform their services, you left CNN on so you wouldn’t have to think about her newborn son.


Who's at the door, Leda?
Your heart is sweating and your hand's turning black.
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the pixellated beak could let her drop? "Give me all your money! Give me all your dope!" No second Troy.

And the sun is like a painting of your whole life; you scratch
at the canvas, but you can't get inside.
Dark webs, her nape caught in his bill; take me to the river.

one adapted from a story found in sabine baring gould myths of the middle ages ed john matthews blandford 1996 pages 115-6 two comprises lines from jordan blilie johnny whitney william butler yeats quote in between from adorno and horkheimer dialectic of enlightenment trans john cumming verso 1997 page 247