"Wakeful Things" by Michael Prior

"The Stag At Bay" Richard Ansdell (1815 - 1885)

You should never put the new antlers of a deer

to your nose and smell them. They have little

insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain.

—Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

Consider that the insects might be metaphor.

That the antlers’ wet velvet scent

might be Proust’s madeleine dipped into a cup of tea

adorned with centrifugal patterns of azalea

and willow—those fleshing the hill behind this room,

walls wreathed in smoke and iron, musk

of the deer head above the mantle. He was nailed in place

before I was me. Through the floorboards,

a caterpillar, stripped from its chrysalis by red ants,

wakes, as if to a house aflame. Silk

frays like silver horns, like thoughts branching from a brain.

After the MRI, my father’s chosen father squinted

at the wormholes raveling the screen

and said, Be good to one another. Love, how inelegantly

we leave. How insistent we are to return in one form

or another. I wish all of this and none of it

for us: more sun, more tempest, more

fear and fearlessness—more of that which is tempered, carved,

and worn, creased into overlapping planes. The way

I feel the world’s aperture enlarge in each morning’s

patchwork blur of light and colour while I fumble

for my glasses beside the bed—lenses smudged

by both our hands. When they were alive,

those antlers held up the sky. Now what do they hold?