Rare Aphrodisiac
Someday, darling,
all the tigers will be dead and gone
and the sun-dried pricks of our perfect killing machines,
salted and stored
in candy jars
at the Chinese pharmacy,
will be worth millions—
but Christ,
how they killed
on the banks of the Mekong,
bright leaves come alive to rip out the antelope’s throat, oh,
how they rolled out
the low growls
and blood-soaked roars
and savagely fucked by the river at dawn.
Perhaps this occurred to me
because there was a picture of a tiger
at the party where we met,
awash in pink martinis,
and the night,
as we stepped into it,
kissing,
was purely mammalian, darling,
the temperature of blood,
and for days I could still see the purple
teeth marks you left in my shoulder.
They were my proof.
At least I had proof.
Still,
I can’t pinpoint exactly when it occurred to me,
but it did occur to me—
when the young men in white shirts
finally bag the last tiger,
when the wily beast rears up
against the leveling of rifles,
and the jungle stands still
pretending not to notice,
when the sad bastard
rumbles the last word for his kind,
a spiteful cry
that will go unrecorded,
when the triggers are squeezed
and the poor thing jitters into oblivion, biting
at the pain before the end, biting the slick holes
flamed into his coat,
as the young men watch the last tiger
violently try to escape his own brain, the killing brain
in paroxysms, at the last, at the end,
before they finally skin him, slice out
that long thin cock for a fortune,
it occurred to me—
when that happens,
the moment the tiger falls, that you might be beside me,
somewhere, consoling me
for some other,
unrelated sadness:
a dying friend, a bad prognosis, an accident,
something horrible,
and you would be the mate to my unhappiness,
but I’m sorry, darling, no, I can’t
remember exactly
when that might have occurred to me.
— PAUL VERMEERSCH
(Originally published Christmas, 1999.)
