This poem is from my new manuscript The Robert Poems. My work is based on the brief life of Robert Blake, the brother of the famous eighteenth-century poet and artist William Blake. By using a speculative transhistorical approach to Robert Blake’s life and afterlife, I’ve been exploring the simultaneous construction and destruction of the self that comes along with what one might call the “trans experience.”
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Not a pleasant thing of speech. Not the unbuttoning throb.
Soft need to be in two places. At once, a lush taste
of another. The body wreaks of what it cannot give. Of the absence,
that it cannot muster. An elongated figure shadowed
by my shadow. You wetten by the lake inside your mind.
I wetten watching beauty become that which we most long for.
The poets speak from their dirt beds. Expression, slow
curse. Slop the infinitude—a night sky creeps from behind
striped curtains. The historical cloth covers two forms
beating like the angels’ hard bodies in the midst of changing time.
Years from now you can wonder about whose body’s stripping
to the sound of doves outside in the city bramble. Tonight?
I move my mouth; you bleed sweet ichor. This is the eternity
we were promised, so I lap it up, you call me sweet king.
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S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Tin House, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Smith’s other writings can be found in Bomb Magazine, The Adroit Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, and Annulet: A Journal of Poetics. They currently run the magazine Tyger Quarterly. S. has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern University. Their first book of poems, A Boy in the City, is out now from Deep Vellum.
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William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age.
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