Poetry

By Ed Madden

Blood Authority
(for a prodigal son)

Blood authority, blood addiction.
Sing the hymn, nothing but the blood.

Before this boy: a weight of names.
Before the body: a book,

this black book, lord.
This is the book of blood.

Roots spread on the thin pages—
dialectics of blood and cum,

oh precious is the flow—
where they converge: a son.

God diagrams sentences,
lineage pictured—

indirection, subordination.
Brother as argument,

made in the same making,
same bucket of blood.

Before these boys, before
the bright army of books, this book.

Before the long road, this inky fork.
Now by this I'll reach my home.

For my pardon this I see—
blood authority, blood addiction.




Thaw

I.

The law is to loosen, to lose, to leave.
The snow releases its lien.

The leaning tree loosens to lengthen—
a prickle of buds along raw limbs.

The law is looseness, laxness, lenience,
the low rustle of tulips.

Drizzle licks the long stems,
tongues the buds open.

II.

Music seethes across a neon dark.
No one knows you here, now,

far from home, this small room.
Video bodies shimmer, blue light,

sweat on blue skin. Strange smells
of salt, mint, vinyl, amyl.

Music you feel in gut and groin.
Hard bud of nipple on your tongue.



After
at Folly Beach

The evening we arrived, that crescent
and star—plow and seed in a sky

that blossomed every night, a field
of gypsophila, baby's breath,

and that narrow sickle set to harvest
it all. We'd walk the tide line,

the cold beach drizzled with light.
We filled a hat with shells, tinkle

of dead things. What were
we looking for amid driftwood

and sorrow, broken bits of storm
debris? A pale shell, lunar

and white, shining in a dark
pool—saucer of pearl, salted

with sand—what I'd hoped to find
was something to remember that last

night on the island, but bent
to lift instead a plastic lid

from a soda cup, litter
of a late-night drink, floating

on tidal scum—and still a frail
salver of light drifted across

the dark water, the black sky.



Writer, educator, and activist Ed Madden grew up in northeast Arkansas, where he developed his love of gardening and all things Elvis. He's now an associate professor of English and gender studies at the University of South Carolina. His first book of poetry, Signals, was selected by Afaa Weaver for the 2007 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, and will be published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2008. He was included in Best New Poets 2007, the Notre Dame Book of Irish American Poetry: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame 2007), and in Gents, Bad Boys, and Barbarians: New Gay Poetry (Alyson 1994).