“Arts and Sciences”
by Traci Brimhall, K-State English professor and Kansas Poet Laureate
What if this time I don’t begin with a requiem
or a memento mori with a split pomegranate
and a harem of flies? What if instead I tell you
a sleeping octopus changes colors while dreaming,
or how my gender is sable and softens with all
the gorgeous etceteras of age. No one guessed
a chameleon’s tongue measured longer than
its body, but it unscrolled beyond tail, beyond
reasonable need. We wanted the mystery
of Mona Lisa, but a physician in line at the Louvre
stood staring so long he noticed her thinning hair,
her yellowed eye, and diagnosed her thyroid.
Sometimes it pays to wait. After all, love is
a syllabus of domestic chores with rolling
due dates and extra-credit candlelight. I once
loved someone who hated raspberries. That was
my first mistake. What if this time I love someone
like you who likes fur on a fruit, someone who’s
better at suffering, who doesn’t confuse their
sensitivity with goodness. What if this time
I think of Darwin, who saw a rare orchid
with a nectary a foot long and exclaimed
Good Heavens what insect can suck it. But he knew
that anatomy could not exist unless a moth
evolved a tongue alongside it, some unknown
species with a proboscis long enough to complete
this union. No one believed because no one
had seen it. Victorian women used belladonna
drops to widen their pupils—that Latin word
for little doll—and make their gaze a black mirror
so lovers could see themselves. You push me
back to study it, the best distance for beholding.
Always you lament, torn by this choice of look
or touch, but it’s time, you say, and close your eyes.
I admit it’s easy to spot a forgery with an X-ray—
brushstrokes too quick, rendering too clean,
the first draft the final one. Behind a masterpiece—
lavender swapped for gray, a lamb under the unicorn,
a hundred mistakes proving how difficult it is to
become something. You joke I’m the Isaac Newton
of feelings. I can predict failure’s orbital speed,
can calculate the chess of silence and confession,
or even the path vines will take to injure the brick.
It’s a gift from my last love, who made a study
of his wounds, made me balletic, a cat burglar
in a house of eggshells. But what if this time
I can’t see it all coming—not the coup dressed
in Fahrenheit, not you dressed as Aphrodite,
not how I could ever trust your marble hands
cooling the twin crescents of sweat beneath
my breasts, marvelling at this wealth of apples.
This is drawn from Brimhall’s next book “Love Prodigal,” to be published in 2024.