4. being born again felt like dying

Grendel was half alive, spent most of his time asleep in a dreamless universe.
When he was awake, hunger threatened to pluck out the spicules that held his watery fur together.
No such thing as crying down there.
His siblings sang, drunk on siblinghood, bathed in tears.
They flipped their silver bodies and the ocean jingled with the treasure of their hard flatness.

It was no accident, how Grendel found himself on a white shore. It was not a reward,
though it was his birthday. Feeling weird
because of his body
full and curvaceous as the moon he was born.

He remembered the first day again.

He’d done nothing to achieve immortality. In some ways, he resented it.

He was only a woman.
Nobody knew what that was.
His tears mingled with seawater
and confused the lines of his body. Incredible hunger. Hunger
that stretched each ribbon in the seams. Hunger for anything
not water, not the darknesses of oysters, not the grotesque armory of lobsters
and frilled sea slugs.

Down there, the bliss of silver shade, when someone was cut
with a rock or some kind of hideousness, the stuff that flowed teased black.

Colorless hunger, hunger that knew another shade of black, the layers of black
knowing that inside the black was red.

Then it was time for him to rise
and break through the shimmering membrane.

The surface was somehow solid. It was the splitting of something huge
inside of Grendel. To see the horizon was the forgetting
of everything before that line
when the tendons of his green fuse stretched out to the vanishing point
and never bounced back.

His siblings said: (don’t forget us)
But they looked and did not see him. They had always resented his voice.
Blind, unhindered of beauty, they were safe
until he opened his mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grendel forgot them instantly. Air, for the first time,
entered and seared lungs he never knew he had.

There was a great heaviness.
A great heaviness all around where his skin met blank, dry space.

He came to an understanding, wordless and without memory,
that this was disunity. Heaven and earth were formed
out of the salty chaos. Hell was there too, he would learn,

much older than the other hemispheres.

 

 

 

 

 

 

5.

Then,
a ship
with sails like fins
interrupted
the tightrope of dawn.

 

 

( )

 

 

 

(who are you?) the sailor asked.
The stone cave was full of echoes, which he and his crew mistook
for malicious creatures. They named various objects and shadows after their ghosts
and goblins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grendel did not know what the clawing inside of him was not even after he saw
what he desired most. A crystal formed inside his body of water.

It must have been a prince, how it shone
and amplified the light.

Back then everything was still water. Everything was water and desire the sucking of it down an invisible drain,

laughter the little bubbles in the blood with the rising body, quickly forgotten
as Grendel slowly left the world of song and darkness, touching himself

to separate. He cleaved himself with every stroke. This must be
what it is like to be born, he thought, skin raw with himself.

Oh, this is the place where the hunters gather,
the beauty hunters,
the cruel ones,
the ones who do not have mothers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. fairy tale

Before the fixation with land and the one hero which populated it,
Grendel’s life was a continual waterboard of discovery. Maybe it was puberty.
Hair and blood
and rubbery bones. Nothing fitting anywhere.
When the blood came like a leaking spirit the people quarantined him.
(The sharks will sniff you out) they said, rolling the huge stone door.
His nipples darkened to a black like newborn eyes.

Grendel decided to forgive them. After all,
they had no concept of injury or sex. What could they have done?

In the wet jet black he groped his way around the cave,
Followed the whispering rustle of shadow through long tunnels.

There was someone else in there with him. She sat in a nest of human bones
and had a mouth that opened further into the labyrinth.

(I know what you want) said the sea witch;
(that a man may fall
in love with you, and that you may have an immortal soul)
and then the witch laughed
and the sludge that leaked from her head was full of ammonia.

(I will prepare a draught for you
your tail will shrivel
you will feel a sword pass through you
all who see you will say that you are
the prettiest little human body they ever saw.
no dancer will tread so lightly

you will tread on knives.
you will touch your own blood
which will be no longer cold but hot.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

8. the best thing

The hunger inside him nudged him with damp infant wings.
(I will do it) said Grendel, and he became as pale as death.

(You have the sweetest voice of any who dwell here in the depths of the sea,
and you believe that you will be able to charm man with it also.

The best thing you possess for the price of my draught. My own blood
must be mixed with it, that it may be I am your mother, when once you had none)

The sea witch wielded a pair of horrible scissors
and carpeted her lair
with the flush of Grendel’s castration.

Grendel was a woman, but the witch in the underwater night had mistaken
something he did not know he had
for something he did not know he could lose.

She put the tongue in a jar of alcohol for later use.
Grendel was crying.

Out of him the tangled bellowing of a land creature.

As a parting gift, the witch gave him a handbook
decorated with exoskeletons. (I made it myself)
(You will make tears without water. That will be time
falling from you.

Secure yourself before you run dry)

That was how he came into the possession of a great secret.
A few thousand years
encapsulated in an hourglass. Each year a pinprick of sand
within rounded numbness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

11. it

The day Grendel rescued the sailor,
pale yellow light broke through the sky-pane
after the sea settled its salted spasms.

The stone clock began for the first time to mean. It began to groan under
the weight of the sun, dragged the carriage across the dark red
of Grendel’s new shadow.

 

What a beauty!
What a man!
How his beauty dangles and hangs!
How he shines!
How his body makes smooth lines!
This is something
Born to be worshipped.

 

Grendel darted into the shadows. He was afraid of man’s beauty and man’s soul
which leaked from Ulysses’ pores easy as sweat, pheromonal, punctuated.
Out of Ulysses’ eyes shot darts that could quench a horse though the word horse did not yet
have a meaning.

It may not have been Ulysses. There were many sailors, many men.