Goblin Mode
For Scott, after Rosaleen Norton’s drawing of Pan shown at the Dowse ‘Sisterly’ show
Remember when I painted you as Pan? A pair
of twisted horns emerging from your temples,
unkempt beard curling to the thicket on your chest.
I could still needle-felt a doll from all your fallen hair,
the coiling brows and pubes that form dark snowdrifts
in every corner of our apartment. Other men
sneered openly when I went home to you, said
do you really want to go on living like an animal?
Little could they smell that’s all I want, nesting
in the funk of our den, piling up the floordrobe
and the Sisyphean dishes, the inner damn, bitch
you live like this? only warbling background noise,
a scold not spoken in our bowerbirds’ burrow,
lined with my shining stones and your toy soldiers.
Remember when I couldn’t see you were an artist?
But here you are with the tiniest paintbrush
gilding the epaulettes of a barbarian kobold. You daub
dainty eye sockets in the skulls at his belt, delicately
render shadows amid his loincloth rags. I love you
because you are still somehow mysterious to me,
when you clear the dishes away
to spread out your incomprehensible games
about buying and selling shares in 1800s trains.
Just like I love when we go goblin mode
in the ultimate closeness of mutual delusion,
two animals domesticated but not tamed. Pest-pilled,
you may become a ferret in a wizard’s hat
crawling up my pant leg, and I will be the fingers
buttoning your sequinned cape. Or I’ll be the musky mustelid
pulled from the beanbag, spike-furred and staticy
in a clingy cloak of polystyrene balls, while you are the hand
holding me up by the scruff of my neck. Others have held
my jaw open to check there were good even teeth
in my mouth. But you behold my ragged fangs, my unkempt fur
and feathers. You kiss my hoof and hold my bloodied talon –
even when my idea of romance is a purpled fairy ring round your wrist,
a perfect imprint of my teeth. Whomst among us doesn’t
get rambunctious? Gremlin king, we give each other wildness.
Bless the strangeness we permit each other, the liberation of this love
in which you never took it upon yourself to make me better –
adopting a pet mess as a home improvement project,
like all the boys who told themselves I could fix her.
No, you thought when you fell, just as I did,
for the ultimate promise –
I’ll make you worse.
Rebecca Hawkes
Rebecca Hawkes is currently pouring out the dregs of her youth in America and missing you all dearly. She edits the journal Sweet Mammalian and co-curated the Antipodean climate poetry anthology No Other Place to Stand. Her book Meat Lovers won Best First International Collection in the Laurel Prize and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards. She has recently abandoned her garden of carnivorous plants to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan as a Fulbright grantee, where so far she is mostly prowling the woods in search of edible fungi.
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