Consider this opening of “Minotaur” by Douglas Kearney:

MINOTAUR

The best part,
how we make to
part the beast
from its self.

The illusion fostered by the abrupt entrée en matière is that of a conversation suddenly caught on a hot mic. The reader is admitted to the “best part” of a narrative which has developed out of earshot.

Of “parts” there are two: one nominal, one verbal; a piece of a whole versus an act of separating.

In the odd phrase “how we make to” (a regionalism?), what work does “make” do in performing the act of parting the beast from “its self”?

Speaking of selves, one of my favorite affectations is exploding the English reflexive compounds into their constituents: “itself” —> “its self,” “themselves” —> “their selves,” etc. I thought I had invented the cheeky gesture!

Here’s the poem’s ending:

Take the bull […]
finding a way,
reeling, through new
bewildering appetites.

The finale evokes a taurine monster inflicting undisclosed appetitive havoc on virgin terrain. Does the wind-up seem a tad… rushed? It’s because I’ve left something out. Cleaving the 2 segments I’ve cited above are 21 lines of parenthetical intercalation. Bulkwise, most of the poem resides in the aside. There, speaker invites reader to get down and dirty in imagining the bull whose head the minotaur’s got:

Take the bull
(whose head it’s got.
Now, conjure you—
the offal, bovine throat,
a veiny tract meant
for an alfalfa pasture, […]

The poem traipses through a trampled garden “got at” by the beast, decorative, human-centric blooms “chomped down,” then takes a turn that still puzzles me:

and there: a tendril
coils from your skull,
then petals split
the temple, come
to bloom. See, how
now the bull face,
stricken, blinks), […]

Who is the “you” behind “your”? In reading “Now, conjure you” at the sentence’s start, I took the “you” to be the subject of the command. Could it be instead the direct object, inviting the reader to be, in the reader’s own head, the bull? It’s a rare poem that doesn’t leave such swinging doors to a never-mind space banging in directionless breezes.

The blink, a sign of life, where unexpected can have a jolting effect. Remember how “Nothing looks back, // blinks twice,” in Kevin Young’s “Usher” ? Such is the case here with the “stricken” bull face. We’d been lulled into visualizing a skull split by blooms. Then… it blinks.

In “Minotaur,” Douglas Kearney swings a come-to-Jesus wrecking ball at the fabulous man-bull graft handed down from the back of beyond. It’s an impish gambol and cunning typographical stunt, meant to be disruptive, to stand symbolic, awesome, awful folderol on its fool head.

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