K y l e M a r b u t —

Hydrangea Study

Was asleep inside a piano when I heard that your feet no longer  reach the ground on account of your new entourage, two  gargantuan white stoats that bear you on your cross wherever  hydrangeas are in bloom. The three of you stare, say Wow. You piss yourself in awe, slicking your britches. I miss your eyes,  how they drank the light, guileless, built objects out of color in  your minds. But I admit, your blue sunglasses offer a certain  priestly mystique. Tried to move the black keys from inside the  casing, to send you a message. We were never born, just ended  up here for a time, in the microseconds before our heads, still  whole, blow away. 

My transformation ceased halfway. Still a towheaded wench,  though now, too, an oaken bough peopled with neon white  merlins haloed by music. Infernologists flock to me, convinced  my contrapasso struck early. I have become an object of much  study. I have sinned, have eaten the peaches before rot and shat  them out, alchemized, upon your prophetic sundials. Your  judgment seems fair, knowing. I was neighborly, insane. My  mothering behavior, despite this wind. And the house won’t  burn no matter how well I light it. I wager my head in the game  my foremothers started, in which I hope to win a key to the  cellar where the final mirror is held, gauzed in steam, reflection  frozen upon a single hydrangea.

They were not singing to me, my thems. The minutes remained  untranslated, the seven seals held firm in their mountain crypts.  Pulled my heart out my mouth by a single vein. Felt umbilical  until an inner voice said blue hydrangea, blue willow, white  flame. Gave myself ten to think about the inevitable betrayal— matter, rain. Made the cut, dropped my inmost off a roof.  Didn’t check the spatter for signs. Dying forever and my mind  palaces with me. Thought my permanent head would grow in  with my heart lopped off but remained headless for so much of  my century. The words felt obvious, a halo. Can I have a  thought I understand. So natural to them, so direct. To ask. For  another world, less dead this time. 

Your blood fell in my eye so I cut off my head and locked it in  an oaken chest, bedded in hydrangeas. Some lobster whiskers  poked out the keyhole, and a strumming sound when I  strummed them. I heard you in there still talking about your  existentialist praxis, the arugula you’ve been growing in  earnest from your buried dead. From our neck sprouted a red  fogbank that veiled the whole hamlet. All started to carry little  bells around, ringing to each other in morse code their  suspicions about the hollows in their skulls, the possible  societies nestled in their caves who simulate the instruments’  sounds, now at work on the walls painting real horses eating  their own heads.

We were all sitting in the dark and one of us was the murderer.  I didn’t think it was me, but couldn’t say or even see who had  now died. Heard the weapon, made of ice and melting. A lateral  slicing motion. A severed head still falling. As evidence, I offer  the owls rapping at the windowpanes, fiending for a taste of the  chill seeping into our blood on the travertine. I feel you  accusing me, your finger in my ass. That’s not how polygraphs  work you maudlin horsefly. I heard the hydrangea squeeze out  the picture window. What of that. Nothing could be more  obvious. What was a shrub doing at my funeral anyway. And  each flower, I noticed before the moon fell into the sky, framed  a clockface stopped at this same hour. 

The nuns were giggling about your haircut. I heard them while  I was hiding in the hydrangea bush having my afternoon snack,  two peanuts and a raw eel I swallowed whole. I like your bob  and I’m not just saying this so you’ll have babies with me later.  Pink and architectural is a good look on you, and those  microbangs…. I was hoping you could tell me about the rain  frogs riding on your shoulders, their embattled interior lives.  Noticed one skywriting from this distance broad aphorisms  over the lake, and the other, without a head, yet imagining  green spheres. I worry that they might need more than one with  your passions could possibly survive.

The dead tree still casts a shadow. The living tree devises a  plan. Feral lightning. Garden hose. Two flocks of chimney  swifts shit on cue over the same golf course. A dairy cow  grazes one blue particle of a rainbow with the tips of her udder.  The pieces are in place but don’t connect. The resentment  never evolves into motion. Gestalt caught in a diptych.  Reflection. A dead sycamore eating a live oak, both blooming  iridescent hydrangeas. Babes crawl from beneath them,  tethered, newly formed from the muddy roots. 

Danger! Danger! Hahahaha I was only joking. It was just a  handful of aardvarks having an orgy in your basement. I chased  them off in my hyperrealistic hydrangea costume. I did a little  interpretive dance set to that violin concerto about a senator  getting fisted by the ghost of every bee. What all us peasants  are raving about these days—that and imported blue wines.  Notes of acid and octopus egg, strawberry, cabbage, oh and  yeast! I for one await my electrocution. These lightbulbs won’t  unscrew themselves, and I’d never ask you, m’baby, to sit  licking your hands in the dark.

I’ll trade you a second for a second. Not the one we were both  just living in, or this one where we’re sharing this thought. It’s  over there, behind your left knee, simmering. I had this vision a  few blinks ago where a whole hydrangea bush bloomed out of  your open mouth. It was horrible and the worst part wasn’t that  you didn’t die. Photosynthesis felt underwhelming, like  breathing but green and in reverse. The second I want is on  either side of that feeling, in the extremity of hope,  disappointment. Where your dozens of flowers each turned  their face toward the sun and had one thought. The pain should  be coming soon.

I forgot where the umlaut goes in your true name. The one  swans whisper when you float by on your neon pink chaise.  Several killers bask in the same sun you stare straight into.  Their victims: a dogpark, two mudskippers, a cathode-ray tube,  an entire strain of ice, ogres, and a miniature tiger bred for  stultifying life as a housepet. The loss is incredible, though we  all feel it as a deadening, misspelled. You call me by my  mother’s maiden name by instinct and already we’re both  becoming trees we’ve never heard of in new hybrid  combinations. Light mangles itself falling through branches we  can’t stop growing from our eyes, our mouths. Our roots twine,  we piss fresh air, we bloom an absence of hydrangeas.

Efflorescence was a fun word until our wedding night. You  came inside me and I felt my teratoma burst. Hair, bone  fragments, clouds, beetles, wind, and raspberries purged from  my torn scrotum. We swept our babies into a bowl and buried  them in the garden. Stole the neighbor’s hydrangea bush,  planted it over the plot. Pink flowers blued, bleached, bloomed  white halos that hurt to want directly. I thought of a name and  you whispered it to me. The house turned translucent, then  inside-out. Felt a steeple’s shadow pass through us as if it were  a gale. Nothing moved. Again. 

I pluck my nosehairs with a live ghost crab. I need all the help  a cheesemonger can afford. Fucking ganache is all I can eat  after thunder detonated right behind my left eye. No insurance.  My linen pants billow as I pirouette to market for a sleep. Saw  sheets folding behind my eyelids. Unfolding in my blood.  What the light does once it’s in me. I would laugh but the  vampiric moths present quite the problem. I give off such a  pregnant glow. Urgent care recommends hydrangeas and for a  nominal fee transports me by sea to their facility. Engulfed in  impenetrable hydrangeas in all directions, even the floral sky.  The canopy blinks, whorls. Look upon me here through your  electron telescopes. Please tell me I look near.

.