Poetry
An origin of water
by Byron A. Kanoti
The Hero was not a hero but a small brother-in-law, who—with his sister’s husband
and father—woke as an opossum then climbed a great tree into the solar system’s
watery center. For there Macaws roosted and sexed and laid their giant, hemispheric eggs,
each of which bore a thousand warrior men, and the boy’s brother-in-law was eager
for one as a son who would kill the future hero because the boy’s father [husband of sister]
grew an infected foreskin that told him: The Hero would return to drown him and he did.
Like a weird war fought in the heart of a dark and palsied country [I am my father’s
only second son] or a people—of the other country—who fished their wishes
from the central well scolded them as omens and commuted to the front with myths
of the soldiers’ sins. Can you tell your fear what it is or how it has become forever—
an infinite set so full of surgery dreams it folded itself into a secret gift [inside a truth
I know deserves me] and the widths and tonnages of hysterical surprise
if light concluded its impossible speed through the portfolios of a telescope’s marauding eye:
we are a miraculous arrow through space and everything everything else is just stupid.