Stonehenge

Albert Goldbarth

Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners

with an arc of piss, and then—until

he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open

on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,”

incanting a doggerel prayer about God

the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and

she, if loose in the halls, would join him,

squatting in the center of the room and masturbating

with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why

they were sent to the madhouse: this is what

they needed to do once in the madhouse: this

is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion

there, created from the few, make-do

materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange

more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor

of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago:

her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers

(for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session),

nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet

she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom;

the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet;

endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry

now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place

all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself

like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose,

in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell

of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one

mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise.

One dusk, one vividly contusion-color

dusk, with my fists in my pockets and

a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I

stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window

(Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in:

a full-grown pig was splayed on the table,

stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if

it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman

slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife,

and then they both scooped out a tumble

of many dozens of wasps, preserved

by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber

gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I

see it? From inside this, over their wrists

in the tripes, they carefully removed

the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman

maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun

and matching brass coin of a moon, and then

a child’s-third-grade-version of a house

made out of pallid wax: a square of walls,

a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.