Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate
a Second before Awakening
—Salvador Dali painting
Bengal tigers from the mouth of a single fish.
Ferocity grandly present mid-leap above a figure—
the white-skinned Sleeping Woman. Both breasts
are light-anointed as she floats over a bed of stone.
Above her, the tigers charge. In a world drawn from
this one, Dali is saying, she would do well to be awake.
Maybe the figure is someone the artist wants or would
like to take a bite out of. Perhaps beasts will devour
her alabaster perfection in a series of vicious gulps,
rendering her part of themselves and some cycle
of satisfying hunger under a white hint of moon—
as if perfection and ferocity were the same thing
and might as well be a rifle with its fixed bayonet
touching the tender inside of a raised right arm.
A wheat-gold horizon says the hour stares back
upon itself as an hour must, given half a chance.
What of the elephant on appendage-stilts, walking
a tideless ocean, a single pedestaled monument
its cargo as it halts in mid-step and trumpets?
A bee around the smaller of the pomegranates
is the reason for her dream, or so we are told.
Never mind the pomegranate’s rubied promise.
Never mind that we are drawn to the elephant.
Dali knows a little about elephants, bees, fun—
if that bee is anything but a bee I’d be astonished.
And women wearing nothing are emblematic, sure.
The hereditary instructions written down in DNA.
But this one is Innocence and the message that
after the grand show of nucleotides and nebulae,
of droplets suspended between heavens and seeds
likewise suspended, there is what’s left over. It
might as well be flesh. It might as well be love.
Lost Storyline from The Life of the Flying Man
When all we have are limits, we live to exceed them
knowing the precincts of thin air are pathless, infinite.
Performing is like that, free of limitation or nearly free.
And who doesn’t love a circus? All of us die, but a lucky
handful are alive and recognize it reaching for the bar,
which is where it should be after a triple with a twist. […]
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Four Torch Juggling
—Kettering, 1965
[…]
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Roy Bentley, a finalist for the Miller Williams prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has published eight books; including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, who is bringing out a new & selected. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Rattle, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Shenandoah among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his latest, won the Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award and awaits publication.
“Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening”, “Lost Storyline from The Life of the Flying Man”, and “Four-torch Juggling”, originally appeared in Free State Review, Orange Coast Review, and New Works Review, respectively.