Richard Lyons

Red Slaughterhouse Non-Memory Number One

My father is wearing a raincoat, lofting an umbrella.
He’s wearing a priest’s collar, white tab at the trachea.
It looks as if he’s hearing the moon’s confession.

The moon is the long red jacket of an Angus.
I wish I were making this up.

It may be the stirring in the room where my father is standing.
The walls are infinitely extendable with these red flags of meat.

The carcasses are singing like fervent parishioners.
I sense somehow that this song is watching me
so everything’s coated with self-consciousness.
I could do worse, one could do awfully worse.

There are bloody penances on the umbrella.
The song is cold, literally, a cold prayer.

My father wants less than shame for me.
He wants me to be comfortable with the approved cuts of meat.
He wants me to approve of the moon hacked by butchers
so swift and expert the sinews don’t feel themselves loosening.

With the umbrella, he walks past me hanging on a hook with the moon.

The moon is in remission from the time before time, the time before shame,
the period of time a good poet called the shape of an angel,
nights without shame, moonless nights,
nights before my face dissolved with shame,

the very first shape ashamed of itself,
the vaguely luminous time shunted by these very words.

RICHARD LYONS teaches in and directs the creative writing emphasis at Mississippi State University. His second collection of poems, Hours of the Cardinal, appeared in 2000 from the University of South Carolina Press. He has work forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, The Paris Review, and Third Coast. The poems appearing herein are part of a new manuscript titled Pure Geography and Trembling.

“Red Slaughterhouse Non-Memory Number One” appears in our Summer 2002 issue.

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