Wunderlich joined Bennington’s literature faculty in 2004. The following is an excerpt from his new book, Voluntary Servitude, copyright ©2004 by Mark Wunderlich appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Bennington magazine. Reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Voluntary Servitude
Poems

Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage, which won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award. He is the recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, The Yale Review, and many others. These poems originally appeared in The Paris Review, Slate, and Electronic Poetry Review. Wunderlich currently serves as Poetry Editor of The Nebraska Review.

Amaryllis
after Rilke

You’ve seen a cat consume a hummingbird,

scoop its beating body from the pyracantha bush

and break its wings with tufted paws

before marshaling it, whole, into its bone-tough throat;

seen a boy, heart racing with cocaine, climb

from a car window to tumble on the ground,

his search for pleasure ending in skinned palms;

heard a woman’s shouts as she is pushed into the police cruiser,

large hand pressing her head into the door,

red lights spinning their tornado in the street.

But all of that will fade; on the table is the amaryllis

pushing its monstrous body in the air,

requiring no soil to do so, having wound

two seasons’ rot into a white and papered bulb,

exacting nutrition from the winter light,

culling from complex chemistry the tints

and fragments that tissue and pause and build

again the pigment and filament.

The flower crescendos toward the light,

though better to say despite it,

gores through gorse and pebble

to form a throat—so breakable—open

with its tender pistils, damp with rosin,

simple in its simple sex, to burn and siphon

itself in air. Tongue of fire, tongue

of earth, the amaryllis is a rudiment

forming its meretricious petals

to trumpet and exclaim.

How you admire it. It vibrates

in the draft, a complex wheel

bitten with cogs, swelling and sexual

though nothing will touch it. You forced it

to spread itself, to cleave and grasp,

remorseless, open to your assignments—

this is availability, this is tenderness,

this red plane is given to the world.

Sometimes the heart breaks. Sometimes

it is not held hostage. The red world

where cells prepare for the unexpected

splays open at the window’s ledge.

Be not human you inhuman thing.

No anxious, no foible, no hesitating hand.

Pry with fiber your course through sand.

Point your whole body toward the unknown

away from the dead.

Be water and light and land—

no contrivance, no gasp, no dream

where there is no head.

Tack

Bridle and martingale,

the crupper’s strap and buckle,

hobble and tassel binds

the mare to matter. Crack

of the crop’s split flap on a flank.

Push begged the animal,

Push begged the man

and the two sprang out,

half-moon of mud flung

from a hoof. Finger flick,

check bit, metal on the tongue

leather in the hand,

knee turn to saddle girdle,

girth gives a little, looser.

Speed is the animal

wish is the man—

curve the neck, roll the eye

the jump is high

but will is all. Pull

strap, fit thigh,

skin covers muscle,

matter is the mind.

White

Among the birches

ears scooped the rustle.

Ruby, his eyes

increased the rounded world.

No pigment save the sepia stain

the gland between his antlers left.

On sugar legs, he’d melt in winter,

leaving prints, aboriginal,

all animal.

Two lights appeared.

Machinery fit itself

to his blue-toned form.

This paper sheet

mimics him,

snow troubling the picture

as any whiteness will.

Dream of Archeology

On the desert hardpan, we set our brushes twitching

to uncover the chips scattered across what had once been a temple.

Nine gates opened in the wind, nine gates no longer visible.

Soon, I found the broken tibia, the net of bones

I recognized as human and my own brush dusted away

the crumbled attar of the grave.

Dust rose up. A shape announced itself to me. Inside

the cracked bowl of a pelvis my mind sketched in a face.

A thing was carried there that met the world with its wet and blood-tender

head. The sun sent down its burning sentence, even and ill-willed

as we disturbed the sleeping mother I begged would forgive

this intrusion. Though my question would be answered with decay.

Breakable

Water and sand and everything shining. Dogs bursting in and out of the scene.

Even the dull mats of seaweed glitter, cold morning. I appreciate all of this from my

window with its superior view.

You’re still sleeping in a city three thousand miles away. Arms, wrists, bare feet lax, bedclothes twisted about you. I know those beginnings with their fog and distant

sirens, worktable and food to prepare, walking softly to let you lie.

In Bavaria there was a madwoman who thought she’d swallowed a glass piano, its

ungodly crystal pinging away as she moved. Servants carried her on her cushioned

palanquin and she cried out from the slightest touch. Burdened by her treasure,

rare, her nerves scared up like a devil, she grew thin, but the instrument held its

shape within her.

It is winter here in this unreal town. A painter is putting graphite to prepared canvas,

illustrating a fairy-tale breast pricked by a thorn. A rose grows there, larks drink and

bleed vines of blood, a woman rides her diminutive horse, false mother’s severed

head weeping in her lap. The woman wears a mask of a dog, tongue lolling. There

is so much in the world that is breaking, so many acts of revenge.

Bed of feathers, sand tracked in, I sweep and sweep. If there’s an other with you

now, don’t tell me. I want my bright morning untouched by an other’s tongue.