There Is a Devil Inside Me
—After Ana Mendieta

Did you carry around the matin star? Did you hold
forest-fire in one hand? Would you wake to radiate,
shimmer, gleam lucero-light? Through the morning

would you measure the wingspan of an idea taking off—
& by night would you read by the light of your own torso?

Did you hear through the curtains a voice, through folds &
folds of fabric a lowdown voice—How are you fallen
from—How are you cut down to the ground?

*

Would gunpowder flash up in the other hand?
Were you the most beautiful of them—the most beauty,
full bew, teful, bu wtie, full be out, i full, btfl?

Did the sky flutter & flower like bridal
shrouds? Did a dog rise in the East in it?
Did a wolf set in the West? Were they a thirsty pair?

And was there a meadow? How many flowers to pick?
And when no flowers, were you gathering bone chips
& feathers & mud? Was music a circle that spun?

*

Did you spin it in reverse? Was your singing a rushlight,
pyre light, a conflagration of dragonflies rushing out
from your fire-throat? Did you lie down in the snow?

Did it soften & thaw into a pool of your shape?
Did you whisper to the graven thing, whisper a many

lowdown phrase: How are you fallen my btfl?

Would they trek closer, the animals? A grand iridium
thirst, each arriving with their soft velour
mouths to drink your silhouette?

Credit:
Copyright © 2018 by Carolina Ebeid. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem:
“I am writing a series of poems centered around the video works of Ana Mendieta. In one of them, Mendieta faces a blank wall with her back to us. She bends down to dip her hands and forearms in a pan that is filled with animal blood and begins to draw on the wall a narrow arc the width of her body. With more blood, she writes at the center of this tombstone-like shape, ‘There is a Devil Inside Me.’ My poem imagines the artist as a kind of Lucifer, the messenger bearing light, before falling from grace into the underworld.”
—Carolina Ebeid

The seeing
have hands
in their eyes.

            – dicho nevadaño

Nativity by Li-Young Lee

In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.

How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night’s darling?

Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,

this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,

just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,

each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.

Once I saw a fox leap inside the morning light and made the same shape of myself.

Homecoming Cistern Alien Vessel

Oh, my planet, how beautiful 
you are. Little curve that leads me 
to the lakeside. Let me step out

of the sack of skin I wore 
on earth. It’s good to be home. 
No more need to name me. No more 

need to make the shape of a machete
with my mouth. Pushing up up up the tired 
sides that want to drop below my teeth.

Lord, I’ve missed you. The streets
covered all day in light from the moons. 
I was confused all the time. I wanted so much.

My hole felt like a gut with an antler
rammed through it. So lonely and strange
and always trying to smile. Coin of the realm.

And my arms open and my life
coming in and out of the “ATM.”
Once I saw a fox leap inside the morning

light and made the same shape
of myself. Once I watched the boats
and also rocked back and forth.

How does every person not cry out 
all the time? Yes, it was good to eat 
doughnuts. Yes. I was blessed by many 

days of joy. A rabbit in the driveway.
A rosemary bush with a sorcerer’s cloak
of spider webs. Brian Eno. 

The Hammond B3 Organ that never asked
me who I knew. But that body.
Like a factory. That mind like a ship

built to pile in other bodies. Skin like a
sow without any of the sow’s equanimity.
It reflected nothing. Pink skin. Blue eyes

hard as an anvil. Like a window with covering
that refuses the passerby’s gaze. I loved 
the bully power some days. Oh my pleasure 

in not causing harm. My pride. I’m not like 
so-and-so. My pink skin preaching, my pink skin 
yawping out my other hole, “I did not choke 

the man with my elbow!” “Would never!” 
“I let all the boys in hoodies walk
through dark streets.” “I did not shoot

them with my guns!” The ship rising
up inside me. As if the fox felt pride 
for not tearing the bird to pieces. As if 

the owl’s heart grew large from not 
wrecking the squirrel’s nest. My pink skin 
a sail full of indignation. My eyes pitching

across the feed. It is so good to be home
and yet. I have a ship inside. How can 
the organ welcome me? I’m not a sow 

on her worst day. Which would be what? 
Breaking from the barn? Eating all the acorns
and rolling in the mud? No.

Her worst would be at my hands 
and on my plate for supper. Grow
like the tree, the man who heals

the bodies said. In every way I became
the ship rising in the harbor. 
How can I be welcomed after that?

The Visitation
Brigit Pegeen Kelly

God sends his tasks
and one does
them or not, but the sky
delivers its gifts
at the appointed
times: With spit and sigh,
with that improbable
burst of flame, the balloon
comes over
the cornfield, bringing
another country
with it, bringing
from a long way off
those colors that are at first
the low sound
of a horn, but soon
are many horns, and clocks,
and bells, and clappers
and your heart
rising to the silence
in all of them, a silence
so complete that
the heads of the corn
bow back before it
and the dog flees in terror
down the road
and you alone are left
gazing up
at three solemn visitors
swinging
in a golden cage
beneath that unbelievable chorus of red
and white, swinging
so close you cannot move
or speak, so close
the road grows wet with light,
as when the sun flares,
after an evening storm
and you become weightless, falling
back in the air
before the giant oak
that with a fiery burst
the balloon
just clears.

From To the Place of Trumpets, published by Yale University Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.