The Camels

Louisa had already run into the ocean.
Rosie and I were walking down slower
when a woman pulls up in a truck
with two camels. Single-humped, almost
too bright to look at, each tuft of fur
a magnesium flare that should hurt human eyes,
but doesn’t. One camel rises on two legs,
picks Rosie up and holds her. Rosie and the camel
look at each other. “He never does this,”
the woman says, as the camel puts Rosie gently
down. Everyone goes for a swim and later
I run down and up the mountain’s steep back,
hauling wood for our fire. The woods
fragrant and cool: sharpraw pine, vetiver.
My legs without any pain. Without memory
of pain. Everyone doing their own thing, and that
thing good enough, and without memory
of the feeling of not-that. Louisa singing
shoulder to shoulder with one camel. Both
camels sitting by the fire, incandescing.
They were humming, like they do.
They were not real camels. I know that.
They were too small, delicate, eyebrows not
bushy enough. They might have been llamas.

Odo

I’ve been thinking of Odo again,
              the changeling on Star Trek Deep Space Nine, the shape
                            shifter who can be— or appear to be— anything:
                                          Tarkalean hawk, trip wire, plasma, chair covering,

but who must, every 18 hours, rest in his original gelatinous state.
              Once this happens in a broken turbolift in the folds
                            of Lwaxana Troi’s dress. It hurts him to hold
                                          human form too long. He does not want to change

in front of her. This is private. He does it, usually,
              in a bucket. The bucket looks like a slightly
                            futuristic trash can, narrower at the top than bottom,
                                          golden and glossy. I thought of this, obviously,

because I want to be liquid in a pail. Solitary.
              Slosh once and be dissolved, regenerate.
                            But I’m unsettled by the scene in the elevator.
                                          Troi is kind, softly asking questions. Odo

turns his face away, sweating and leaking apart. “I did not
              grow up,” Odo tells her, of his early years being
                            studied in a lab, “it was merely a transition
                                          from what I used to be, to what I learned to become.”

He describes trying to fit in, changing to entertain
              scientists at parties: “Odo, be a chair. I’m a chair.
                            Odo, be a razorcat. I’m a razorcat,” he says, letting out
                                          involuntary moans of pain.

She ask what she might do to make it easier.
              “Nothing,” he says, but then she removes,
                            (though it is no equivalence) her wig, and somehow,
                                          this helps. “Let go,” she says,

“I’ll take care of you.” And he looks up,
              at what I don’t know, takes a gulp of air,
                            and becomes a shimmering gel, briefly still
                                          human-shaped but metallic,

translucent, boneless, glowing red where
              a human heart would be. And pours
                            into her dress, which she has gathered up
                                          for him to rest in.

 

 

Miller Oberman is the author of Impossible Things, forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2024 and The Unstill Ones, Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2017. He has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Prize, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. He teaches writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York.