Soft Object

Leonore Wilson

That which goes into the mouth and is eaten

is mortal, perishable, transformed

 

like knowledge, the way a subject takes within himself

something important, alien, that which is hard

 

made soft, deliquesces, and this thing becomes him,

doesn’t it, isn’t this what Dali wanted us to see,

 

to understand in the teaspoon, the prolongation

of its handle and the shallow bowl which contained

 

the little watch, or the ossification of a railway station,

the soft clock making its first appearance

 

in The Persistence of Memory, saying all gnosis is found

in phantoms, dreams, the fourth dimension…

 

I listen to the sax and trumpet made malleable

by Billy Holliday’s limbering voice, I take

 

the host in my mouth, crack its weight against my palate

and it bends, I remember how my breasts

 

were sex once, when the rigid milk ducts filled,

then the little pump’s blue horn, the rich liquid rising

 

inside the midget bottle, the yellow colostrum

like chrism, and I remember my son who tried to stuff

 

all my mother flesh inside him, in his small Pavarotti mouth;

how heroic it seemed when the string of milk left,

 

that sudden ribbon of white, opalescent, when he thirsted

like a night-blooming flower, his gullet becoming

 

sated, fed clear to the core, and distance bent backwards;

yes, the stuff of time vanished when I unbuttoned my blouse.