the walls are to be thirty cubits
high for three hundred cubits of length
fifty the width—the animal inside
half bull bull of a man born of that man
of a bull lots of bull
on this island generally speaking
such clichés "the beasts
outside are easy it is the beast
inside of us etc"—the Queen
you know she told me once she felt
it wasn't fair to her she said
"there was a bull in me before there even was
a bull in me" and I sort of
stood there wringing my hands I thought
it would be difficult to make
paths so they would twist over themselves like that
you know like how your guts go and I
I mean I've been solving puzzles like this
all my life but the deal
here is to make an unsolvable one
but it's easy to get lost
all you need is to sort of
copy your wander
and that's it—and you know—
at the risk of courting some
monstrous commonplace I'd say that our
strangeness generally consists
of love love is our strangeness because
we love such different things
so wildly differently they run the risk
even at most innocuous
instances (ketchup on pizza) to disgust
others against us
what you love about the smell of tar
and sewage in July
what colour makes your forehead itch
what body part you see
when you close your eyes
on someone you like
what secret satisfaction you derive
from filing your nails
what part of speech you'd like to eat
what words you'd marry
what planet you dream of swallowing
(the taste of Venus
and light under the wings of moths) our habits
of thought and movement trace
labyrinths in us—and who (we ask
ourselves) will walk in them with us?
baked brick the outer walls inside
it will be granite white
on the left and black on the right
circles of gold and silver
clouds on the left and golden stars
and silver circles on the right
and the floor I will leave barren
it will be covered in blood
and the footsteps of the slain
a world of bones will
populate it—and the poor boy
shut in there forever
as he will be will at least
have something to look at
robbed of either sky
at the center maybe
a patch of grass which would be
scales of jade inlaid
into the floor of that spot so he
can lie down in it
and pretend he is away—what does
the bull want anyway
has anyone asked him? Even his mother
(and forget his dad)
the ceiling will be blue—the sea
or the sky I guess
that will be his to figure out
I will scatter the place
with small clockwork beasts
to call his friends
a hedgehog made of sewing needles
a lobster with a brazen
shell a piglet on hidden wheels—he might
destroy them for fun
but that's his problem I think
if he wants to be bored
he can go right ahead so difficult
to please anyone anyways
you might say I'm pathetic doing this
I'm not—I am
perhaps to be pitied the least in
all this—I sit
and sketch things all day long
imagine things
and the outside world grinds on
and the scythe
of day passes over and over
the face of all
would you pity a graven face
whose eyes can
never close? do you envy
the worm for
all the ways that it can move
and twist?
one day this drudgework
will all be done
and we will make our getaway
if I must trap
this boy in the earth this way the same
way I will set
us in the sky—imagine wings
where your arms
are—imagine how it will look
the earth from way
up there—
and the light—the light I forget
a circular mirror
three cubits in diameter reflecting
sunlight to a large
glass prism the colours then reflected
endlessly along the
metal in the walls—when you think
of it the sun is
pretty plain on its own
—who asks me what I want?
(and the broken light
(who said wanting was easy?)
declensions of the sun
at an angle Ɵ where x is
James Dunnigan is a poet from Montreal, editor for Cactus Press and PhD student at the University of Toronto, the author of two chapbooks, The Stained Glass Sequence (Frog Hollow Press chapbook award, 2019) and Wine and Fire (Cactus Press 2020). A recipient of a QWF Fiction award for 'Open Bay' (2014), he also has appeared, or is forthcoming in, such places as Event, Contemporary Verse 2, Maisonneuve and Graphite Publications. Aut facere scribenda aut scriber legenda since 1994.
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