The Maynard
Spring 2018

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Terrigenous:

Upon the Finding of Two Vials of Ted Bundy’s Blood in a Florida Memorabilia Display

Your gait, prints, handwriting, voice—these biometrics
and the double helix distinguish you on the one hand,
help you know one another on the other, help identify you.

Whenever two objects meet, there is always an exchange,
something large or small as cells.

Take the flower water under the dahlias.
It’s an underworld. Flower fibers twist and fork.

This is what a day can do: make golden a ratio of death,
make simple pattern, disintegration, fold-in the sun,

and when a vial of Ted Bundy’s blood turns up, you can
Google Ted Bundy and Geometry. Instantaneous,

his hand geometry in an essay,
his handwriting, rounded, graceful with imagination.

*

The girl you believe is a stripper wanders over to the coffee shop
from the wretched coastal hotel. She’s a friend of a friend, turns out,

and she’s almost always mostly naked, sometimes with her boy
on her hip. You tell her you teach geometry,

and you worry. You have reached a certain age, protective.
She has reached a certain age, vulnerable, fodder for the likes of killers.

She says, You must know about Pythagoras. She doesn’t know
that letters, not numbers, are your new bones of contention.

Even your name is scratched into the glass windows of your class.
You try to guess which blue door at the old hotel is hers.

*
Murder seems the furthest thing
from her mind. Bundy is history.

She doesn’t know that Bundy writes with a certain lightness,
indicating an ill-adjusted personality, and his capital “A’s”

with a perfect oval and the small letter “N” in place of a capital
signify clarity of thought and simplicity. The girl from the old hotel—

she doesn’t think the stabbed person survived
after you say you saw the forensic van

parked out front one morning before dawn.
The girl puts her black-rooted angel fluff over one ear.

*

Her curls are like Bundy’s “Cs” indicating his sense of beauty,
clarity, and poetry, and his capital “D” showing originality, the “D”

whose great degree of swelling indicates his vanity.
The girl from the hotel tells you her boy believes

the old hotel is his whole big house. He doesn’t want to move.
She tells you a tale she loves about Pythagoras and his mother, how before he was born,

his mother visited the Delphic Bee, who told her she would have a son,
and he would surpass all men, and his mother must be vigilant.

His mother prayed to the goddess Pythoness. When he was born,
she named him after the goddess, and the ghost of Apollo was in

their house. People were not sure if he was man or god.
They didn’t look for the Ichor running through his veins.

*

This is before, before they found Ted Bundy’s blood,
two vials in a tiny exhibition in Florida. It was type O positive

thirty-three-year-old blood in the diorama with his dental molds,
before you learn that Bundy never knew his father, never knew

that the woman they called his sister was his mother,
like an ancient Grecian dilemma, and before you know it,

his small “d” links to the next letter by a gracious curve
that shows that Bundy has a logical sequence of ideas,

and his printed “H” indicates a sense of grandeur,
strength, and liveliness. He wrote as if he were a god.

*

They are hoping for a cold case miracle set in motion
by Bundy’s DNA, two helixes,

each one a construction of ten regular polygons oriented
about a decagon, and when they are translated

into three-dimensional space, these pentagons
become prisms with all lengths equal.

The hotel girl’s bangs are a rolling wave
breaking against her skin. She has a child voice.

Everything, every good thing, has three parts,
according to Pythagoras. You don’t know yet

that Bundy received three death sentences. You don’t know yet
hypotenuse comes from the words for under and to stretch.

And you don’t know Bundy’s small “Ts,” in place of capitals,
heavily crossed, show a person with willpower, who is also

domineering, and the hypotenuse of a right triangle
inscribed in a circle stretches between the two legs.

*

The girl from the hotel tells you about the movie she is making
about skim-boarding in Spain, and how she wants to move to one of those

beach paradises in Mexico along the coast, one of the ones that started out
as a shack. You know about the four boys just found together in a grave,

decapitated, no doubt, by some cartel, because your students gave you
the website to watch for the latest Mexican violence. There are worse

things than being gored by a bull. You know they watch it on their phones
during class. You tried to lose the URL, but it just keeps turning up,

the slip of graph paper in a pocket or at the bottom of a bag.
There it always is, but you know you meant to lose it.

*

You don’t know that the hand’s geometry is not unique.
Only the skin of your hand distinguishes you

with its old burns. You know the crematorium choked
on Ted Bundy’s executed body in 1989, sent his ashes out

over the flea market where a good friend of yours was a child
with her mother, shopping. And they inhaled him.

You know this girl from the old hotel, like the girls in the continuation school,
may be the perfect serial killer target, but you don’t know yet


that Bundy’s blood is so well preserved that even the driest flakes
close to the vial’s mouth elicit a beautiful profile.

The girl from the old hotel has a name as suggestive as her pelvis.
You tell her yours means god-like, and oracle is another word for plead.

You don’t know how to plead her case for her. Don’t go
comes to mind, like a heinous URL.

It’s three years before the girl’s boy starts school, she says,
so she’ll have to move to Mexico now, if she is really going to do it.