Rites of passage.
This is a sacrament called undoing.
There, rank.
There, form.
There, plot.
Return.
Not the way you came.
That way is also undone.
Go where
movement will unravel, too.
To find a beginning.
It is not what you remember, not yet.
Poet in flight.
Always overdoing it, you rebel at limit, a mutiny barely contained by swing of body, sway of voice, as oceanic symphonies thunder from your deepest ear, to press your thumb against the troubled fold of this opening history that it might yet be smoothed transcendent. Ever the acrobat, you bear the body’s flight into the undulating net of current events in ancient time and hold it there, in the intimate round of your long lens.
And the problem of meaning to make it.
If I were really up to something, you would think I would have an answer to the question of where any of this starts, but no. It’s just this ledge again, and gravity, and my desperate grip. Meaning not to forget to remember, I stretch the web of impressions, meaning to stick somewhere. But whatever I am made of mostly slides, and sliding, what tends to stick to me is never quite the stated destination, but everything beneath its arcing aim. What tends to stick rarely unsticks and I do not forget it. And yet, I still mean to reach what I hope to remember.
Without escape.
The sorrow quotient settles in a deeper register
of knowing, a bog of drunken insight and cat eyes.
It was said of the first poet I loved and recognized
that he lacked the rooted normality of a major voice
and this makes a new kind of sense to me now.
What rough vocation demands such strident use
of sick days to repair the broken levees of a fool
soul bent on protecting the unlooked-for
where sky and ground roar a running river
to spell variations in chorus on the page?
This silence for want of better words
only lives by careful collections of foragers
on shores who number shells on shelves
and bird feathers by weathered tendrils
of larger limbs. The thin page.
The shaking hand.
At the cliff from which this land begins to slide.
Harpooned by grief, time comes to cut the line
of this dogged continuance and admit the map
language won’t translate. Birds enter water
after fish and we stop to absorb the impact
of what they are doing out there, almost
all of it unknown. We would circle and bow
if we could reach them. Now, we think, is time
to map another language for where has never
been a destination, taking boats that take on
water to pull us into her countenance, that we
will know that we have only ever been a
people of unmarked territories, our names
unwritten where they still against the gums
of uncut teeth.
Of flesh and earth.
Here comes another to be named,
where naming will not capture
her back. This is some other place now,
where the mountaintop froze above
its consecrated ground, above
these walls, their trumpets,
our removal.
Alice wakes, weeping snowmelt.
How easily we reason, but
this sight may come too late.
Blind mice run from the knife.
and here is our mirror-girl again,
after the rabbit. Heralds, run.
The gaze is silver. Its illuminating fire
now spent.
We figure one another out of living,
from a dream not remembered.
Take off your shoes, daughter.
Drip tears into ash. Time leaks
a sermon from the eyes
of its messengers where words
are impossible, back into the open
mouth.
In the underworld.
He came here looking for the blind prophet. Through a hole he came down from the living, from his way by which he and the ways of his men were lost, again. Not to admit any wrong, not to admit the penance due those who anger the gods, but I knew my son. His stubborn stance. I was there with the other dead mothers and our stance was reaching from where we waited below the land of the living beneath where they burned the false claims they would make in slaying other sons––and our daughters, too, in the name of their stakes and how high they made them, where the air thinned. I knew my son and I saw his desperation in that heat. See me, I called to him. He looked up and I saw it on his face. Mother, he said.
He still knew the word. Yes, I said. Now go, I said to him, from this fire while you still live.
It was too hot and too loud for him to hear more though I meant to remind him back to the life he knew before he knew to wave flags above the graves of other mothers. Where he was barefoot and fed before he thought to scorch the land he meant to take. To add, take this body, son, that I gave you, and return it to the living earth.
***
Anticlea is the mother of Odysseus, who encounters her son in the underworld where he has come to find the blind prophet, Tiresias, to tell him the way back home.
Noon light with concrete.
Still, the sky, even absent of its messengers seems to wait, remembering flight and us beneath it and the everlasting concrete, within blinking gaze of shuttered blinds where we could not put our words to work, where I looked for dreams in sleep between these buildings and us within their walls and our voices and the birds with us calling back and the cats who would crouch to attack the winged singers and later learn with talons in furred backs to accept their gentle weight, keeping company close when it comes, even here.
In constant vigilance.
What quickens
toward some destined end
in keening cry. O bird.
Weep for this house,
in spiraled anguish.
I feel you poised.
A sense of something
making an exit. Shore foam
and the ebb of us, waving
Kelp -swaying praise
dance toward surfaces above
which seabirds circle, ready
To dive. Then Black Hawk
shadow, lined against
the light. What comes.
