Alexandra Teague
Two POEMS
In the Glass Labyrinth at the Nelson Atkins Art Museum, the Rough Beast Is Mistaken for the Minotaur
As if art is enough to unmake the inevitable;
as if a beast can enter, at will, any myth’s
clear walls: as if each labyrinth promises anything
but a nest for the egg of the self you’ve already
hatched. As if Plutarch didn’t get there first. As if Paul Simon
didn’t get there after, “Mother and Child Reunion”
rhythming away on The Beast’s earbuds, and the walls
winding one way in, which is the same way back,
which is maybe what Aristotle meant by “infinite sequence”
or Simon by “a motion away,” which is where his face is
each time he looks for it: reflected in the lawns’ reflection just
ahead, like that joke on the Jungle Cruise (where a kid
called him “wildebeest”) where the pygmy waves a shrunken head,
and the guide cries, “What’s that up there in the river
a-head?” Funny-not-funny mother of all mythologies:
that the future will mirror the name we call it. The glass
windexed so clear even here it looks like air he almost birds
head-first into as the kid says “Look,” gesturing finger-
horns like it’s a zoo; like in this real labyrinth, you’d need
a string. Though it’s not the kid’s fault the language of
myths got tangled so far back there is no unicursal path now:
the past as uncertain as the future, as Diderot said.
Or as the Beast wants to say, “No, kid, I’m Superman,”
miming bird-plane arms, though the corridors are
too narrow for wings or explanations like, I’m walking toward
Bethlehem, which could as well mean away from Bethlehem
and back, or I’m walking until the end, which never comes,
no single shell-crack, but more world sputtering on
in frying pans and oiled reggae licks and Chinese menus and
squat bronze Henry Moores and gum-cheeked kids
pasting their faces to glass like aquarium fish, all of it
roped together in some great paradox science
explains now as mutation—a chicken hatches from an egg
of another bird, and they both came first: what’s that
a-head? The future! One beast or another—
like the chalazae, suspending what will be and
the strange what-is, roping yolk to white to shell.
Adult Coloring Book: Utopia
NOT TO THE FUTURE, BUT TO THE FUCHSIA.
—GERTRUDE STEIN, PORTRAITS AND PRAYERS
To the overwintering of hope; utopian
bloom-back and blaze of pink outvibranting all pastels.
The song of the dark times sung in scotch-bonnet
orange. To the brave, the garish, the clashing
a fashion mag tells me are trending as antidotes.
(Chromotherapy, the coloring book promises; stress relief
via the sea of energy where color works inside you.)
To the Kelly-green suit of the drummer playing “Under
Pressure” on the lunchtime street, his ill-fitting beats
building like a flooded moonbridge. To wrong, harmless
visions hammered on pedestrian malls; the carousel’s spindled
spinning, its bejeweled horses, besaddled tigers lain
down together in peace. To all architects of unity, even if time
proves them suspect: the twin spiral stairs helixing heaven
to earth at Shakertown, my favorite on childhood road trips,
their God made in the image: male and female; the equal intensity
of red and blue that forge to fuchsia: one He-She bell
petaled, fringed, and ringing. To hope with teeth,
China Mieville calls for. Barbed hope. With blackberried
tongue. Brambles and all. To all the safe colors of skin
and of blood: unscarred magenta of birthmark sluicing
cheek; beet-hickied lovers and sweet-bitten plum.
The staggering stains of our wanting. Quince-jam brick
streets and honeycomb skyscrapers scraped clean
for our filling. To hope’s sore persistence, tonsillar,
inflamed the doctor tells me must precede the healing.
To They say we’ve gone grey, but we haven’t gone anywhere
touting not hair dye in Age-Perfect Dark Pearl Blonde,
but hope’s strongest engines, its cylinders and pistons—
what Stein says we must be: the motor going inside
and the car. To the nowhere we haven’t been yet
and the nowhere we have. Utopia’s contradictions like a boat-
shaped airport: strange, real place from which we might
disembark. To the woman raised in a cult where if
the leader said the sky was green, it was with her blizzard-blue
blue bell, wild blue, navy, and midnight all sharpened
for different real hours. To pendular colors knocking
against the sides of the times in which we are.
Alexandra Teague’s books include the poetry collections Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea, 2019), The Wise and Foolish Builders, and Mortal Geography, and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. A former Stegner and NEA Fellow, she teaches in the MFA program at Idaho and is currently on sabbatical in Wales.