Frank Paino
Swallow
Spring again and outside our hotel window swallows raise
their raucous cries between branches that bear only
the faintest blush of jade. I watch you, still lost to dreams,
a knife-edge of sun slicing the length of your perfect neck
and I’m back to yesterday, to the Mutter’s two dwarfed
galleries, their brass and polished cases hung with human grief:
a young man’s throat flayed and pinned wide to unveil
the tumor that finally choked back his last breath;
twins molded pelvis-to-face in a grotesque parody of
pleasure; the toothless woman, mouth agape,
whose corpulence turned her to soap inside her grave;
countless rows of bone eaten to lace by syphilis and deep
drawers filled with objects swallowed and later retrieved—
dental work, buttons, children’s toys and a puzzling host
of unclasped safety pins. We passed an hour or more amongst
the wreckage of so much flesh. Long enough to remind me
why I don’t have faith in any god...long enough to make the lovers
who moved behind us press so close I knew their night would
end sooner than most in the comfort of their rumpled bed.
What better salve for sadness than such bliss? And we,
having had our fill of things unsound, stepped back into
the street where the seemingly-whole wrapped their coats
against early evening’s chill and carried themselves to the places
strangers go while we drifted, arm in arm, back to the hotel
where you opened your thighs, luminous as x-rays
in the fallen light, and I swallowed the damp gathered there
then entered you as a swimmer enters a warm, solemn lake,
and we slept, limbs entwined, while the Milk Moon moved
across the sky until morning swallowed it whole, just like
the light that vanishes halfway down the throat of that
nearly-bottomless cave in Mexico where swallows rise in
unison each dawn, unspooling from darkness in a fluttering iris,
round and round until, at last, they spill into daybreak and
disappear toward the far horizon. I think their swift ancestors
must have mesmerized Cortes and his men, made them
draw back their reins and watch a while in wonder. I want
to believe the sight of those thousand-thousand wings lifting as one
made the soldiers stay their torches a heartbeat or more before
they wicked the forest into a second sun to burn their way back into
paradise. And I want to believe they wept to see those birds chase
cinders they mistook for prey until their flight became a smolder,
then a stillness as they fell back to this earth which, however broken,
beckons us to drink deep. Swallow. Deeper still.