"VEIL" by Rodney Dailey
poetry from Gully Issue 2
My uncle, bad girl, gets to walking, walking to rake his blackened lungs through bricked alley hot with ice melt. In the avenue’s mist before the newly bright pipes, the drapes return an incarnadine lace, lapping up a body; blighted leg dances lover-retching at the bottom of a citied hill. He does this because he has no choice, he says, beyond glass thinner than chiffon. The one and only time we meet he shows my twin sister and I a painting of his. It is tarnished and busy. A face like mine is wide-eyed, sullied. There is something bubbling from its tongue which is split in two like a snake’s. The reds are rusted and dim. Part of the canvas is lacerated and curled open. This is the only work of his interrupted by pane. See this color, he says. It’s mine, comes from right here. He shows his cratered forearm. For this my father flares up from the fore- ground like a thunderclap, punches his younger brother in the jaw. His lip now a brilliant flash before a copper portrait. We become accustomed to a parade of estranged uncles; father reminds us he is one of nine, seven of them boys. We’re shuffled off past the shuttle door of a foreclosed loft. We carry the brazen flesh of his lip home. My uncle, bad girl, goes walking, walking—no action on Mass. and Cass, but close, near a corner where electric column-light flush meets flailing boughs and shoelaces. Stalks of brown and white matter airborne along a mountain chain of haphazard tents and diseases. He meets a first. They know. They see. He passes a burly saxophonist blowing teeth, a hail into heavy wind underneath a rubble of skin lesions. His grin fingers the ligature, low and mossed, the bell a dark forest under a canopy of utility poles. Sharing heat, he will sleep here tonight, still and vibrating; he will carve into the night-bark like a perfect emerald ash borer. This is not the first I hear of him dying. When he dies now it is in a den. There are men here coiling their pleasures. Because he has been born with a wound that grows more pronounced as he begs, I watch him through a half-silvered mirror. A lightning beetle in a pot, his sight poisoned by the strobing hum of his own Bioluminescence—he can only see him- self in disoriented flashes. Stumbles by a courthouse. The rotted tissue is green and collared. A distance becomes a caress is an insect becomes a chasing out. His gait is dangerous, his iris a cavernous taking in. My uncle, bad girl, goes walking, walking, haunting a strip mall of liquid churches. He hovers down a sidewalk, a verb without work. A refusal to thresh. An incomplete hold. In ancient greek there is the aorist, a kind of perfect, simple aspect, a kind of unmarked happening, like his diagnosis and disappearance. He has already vanished. He is always Evaporating, embracing a splintered sky. He has already floated down past the harbor, which is always opening, ruptured artery into the north atlantic. There is no translation for this, this erotic embolism, this will to die and die, to go walking into death, to die again without wanting, with infinite desire, and it has been killing him since the saxophonist.
Rodney Dailey is a poet from Boston, Massachusetts. He currently lives in Iowa City, IA with his two black cats.