Marcus Myers: My Double Appears
As the World Turns, My Double Tries to Break Me
1. Spring
The double delights within
my daughter’s irises. He twins there
above the tulips we planted.
As if he and I were wearing feathers.
As if we shared a branch
of her beloved soul.
He hums the tune we sing together,
minus the words. I begin to hum it, too.
Between our teeth
the livid gaze, vis-à-vis
this exactitude of form and sound.
Between this uneasy stasis:
my daughter, contiguous
despite this splitting.
The first father
from whom she turns
will murder the other,
will fertilize this soil.
2. Summer
My double reappears
with garden shears.
He offers to cut away
my overgrown every day.
When moved to ask,
What gives?
one of us sneers
and the other says:
Only one of us can live.
3. Autumn
I’m fed up with you,
I say to the face,
a line the double
exacts and transposes
onto the door’s leaden glass.
The stubble-brown
flower garden beyond
our eyes the foreground
of my daughter’s leaving
in her mother’s car
(the ex he drives away).
Let’s sing a song of crickets
indifferent in soft-dying fields,
he says, the chapped lips
around his stupid gap
so dystonic my stomach
turns. The sincerity
so dumb, I run
my fist through the glass
and blind us with my pain.
4. Winter
I could compare the double to winter.
Easy. He lies dormant now. His presence:
the muted birds, the star-tuned snow,
a shroud over once-heated soil.
The regenerative animus he was
becomes a coffin text I hold to ribs.
I am not dead yet, I think. He’s a spell
I say without his likeness in mind.
He becomes the dying light,
the sun’s inner warmth in reserve.
He’s the figure who cast doubt
in place of shadow: Who are you?
I asked. When I watched him ask,
Who am I? I and you spun
on its axis: Who’s hallucinating whom?
Once I saw him covered in snow, I knew.
Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, where he advises gifted & talented high school students, teaches composition to high school seniors and college freshmen, and works as a founding co-edititor of Bear Review, an online journal of poems and micro prose. His writing has appeared in The Cortland Review, Hunger Mountain, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Pleiades, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, Tar River Poetry, TYPO and elsewhere.
