Flower / fig / octopus / organ – by Hannah McCann and Duc Dau
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1.
You suggest we write about the end of love.
Well today I saw a black wasp ambling over straw
a staccato walk as if she were stop-motion. Blue
wings glossed as deep-sea, ink body, solitary
flower wasp. After long pause, buried herself.
I could see the ground moving where she dug in,
kept my eye on this spot, she, under earth,
some Plathian desire, as I sat there.
2.
Your chthonic Lady Lazarus in her wasp’s grave cave
reminds me of a smaller type of gossamer wings.
Fig season ripens in my inner-city neighbourhood
– inverted flower, upside-down uterus of anatomy books.
A few species hang on fig wasps for pollination,
burrowing into fruit for orgies, nurseries, mausoleums.
Sex / procreation / death. The wasp is buried alive
for much of her life and dissolves in her final feeling.
3.
How swift the move to sex. Pleasure as if peering
through thick glass, blur of brush colours in blue tint,
wasp at the window. See how much I hold back.
Her heartless, bloodless figure taps the pane.
Unlike your wasp, who slips into swinging orb
to lay and be digested, my no-heart burrows
to earth to find a grub for egg injection. Meat
chewed from the inside-out by hatchlings to come.
4.
Gnawing on grub, your larva flushes in survival,
its no-heart shifting thoughts from low tide to a flood
of beats. A three-hearted octopus at the beach, tongue-tentacles
snatching prey before gliding from rockpool to glassy sea.
Guts and hearts, blood eddy in time, swollen as incoming
waves. Imagine being wrapped by her sticky limbs in the thick dark,
with salty eyes, tendrilled hair, know our ancestors came from
the sea. Some of us don’t have hearts now, let alone three.
5.
Underground / underwater / I am closer to the heartless
wasp as feeling machine, fizzing thorax. Pace
through a heart ward and you will see cuts-outs
as if it were Valentine’s Day. Cardiac blues,
tears that fall after a heart event. As a child
I never dipped a toe into a rockpool, for blue-ringed
fear of a heart-stopping bite. Just as now
I refuse to write about the end of love.
6.
Dickinson said The Heart wants what it wants – or else
it does not care – but how to jolt an octopus’s hearts
or a wasp cavity without denouement in aftercare, drowning
in the blues. Last year at a commemoration for organ donors
I puzzled over packs of tissues on our blood-red seats
– until sniffles, weeping sounds from families and me.
Transplants are a second chance at life. A second chance
to say I <3 U because a heart once belonged to another.
7.
Maybe a new relationship is like an organ transplant
– putting a heart in a whole new body, haunted
by beats for past lovers. Wasp under dirt / wasp into fig.
You want to talk about the end of love – why? – why not
beginnings, looping waves, at least eight arms to embrace.
Today, in the middle – please, not the end! – the cards showed
two cups, two coins, two wands, and yes, the sting:
woman with two swords across her heart.
8.
I have been pairing our cards, my left hand twinning your right.
No heart ever arresting / triple hearts never emptying /
octopus counterweighing wasp. You want to dive from wave
to wave of oxytocin beyond counting. Side stroking, not looking
forward or back. I never had a brain for stats but what
is the probability of beginnings without endings? To be
always arriving, a wasp mid-air
Notes:
‘Grave cave’ is drawn from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’
The Heart wants what it wants – or else it does not care – is from Emily Dickinson’s correspondence to Mary Bowles, Spring 1862: https://archive.emilydickinson.org/correspondence/mbowles/l262
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Image: Esra Karakulak - Pexels
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