& the persistence of matter
where i am what i carry
limestone in the architecture
of my teeth, old seas
gone hard inside me
the quake of shifting earth
the silent reach of filaments
dendrites threading through the soil
of this place
where i carry
forgotten songs to long-gone
stars
mud ripened by the bodies
i have absorbed into me
by teeth
caught in my right hand, the sick
gathered between my elbows and
my heart, the faces i have held between
these, my grandmother’s hands
in which nothing leaves
I may not have loved since entering
this purgatorio but I have known attractions
fired by recognition
of another body
in whom I recognize
some ancient home
the here-not-here, by rock & sway
of crowded boat, my form giving
against the solemn jag of craggy cliffs
through dark orifices of another war
where some cite the wine-dark sea
of avengers, mourned back
to battle and then dead
whose sons return to repeat them
until all lines of origin are erased
I, too, descend
from ancient clamor,
silenced now:
carbon fixed first inside familiar cells
of marine life: phytoplankton, algae,
buried & altered over eons.
I slept beneath you,
before fire, before when
rough-gloved hands
came to enact what they called
refining
pulling apart
my ancient form: ethylene, propylene,
remnants fastened
into intricate chains.
I know to be molded,
to take the heat of this earth
made hot enough to burn its own
past the capacity for return
I know the sudden cool that
follows, before this
float, where I fill, sink,
shatter
having bottled illicit toasts
swallowed by shrubs in midnight parks,
passed hand to hand in fallout
aftermaths, left beside desert rocks,
emptied by those dying
of thirst to cross
as leaf dies into another life
as whale becomes carcass becomes
food, light, shelter, home.
as bone into mineral, into soil
into tree, then leaf again
by the light of a distant star
but i cannot rot, only break
into finer pieces,
some sand-sized
but never sand:
ever eroded
never transformed
denied my next death
i may only attach myself
to blood, lung, womb, milk,
to inner ear but not to hearing,
to mouth but never song,
to heart & longing
without capacity to beat
& then cease beating.
The living make of me a reef
& come. They flower on me,
then go.
Pulled from our long burial
we are deep time made impatient,
forever arriving
at new shores
as ourselves
unable to become
anything
else.
pending fluency
before phonics, i read books of creatures,
announced emu to my grandfather’s
startlement & then it was time for
real school. the gray stone building
behind the chain link fence, waves of
traffic in the intersection behind it
where rows, where walls, where
flag, clock, map, crucifix
announced some portent by fluorescent
light. but this, i could not read
or else the body read it first: tongue refusing
the sounds, mouth rejecting the syntax
of that space, coughing up whatever
obedience it was given. sick
every morning over asphalt in the parking lot,
then silence. head bowed, entered
& learned to conjugate what was called
education, a force
with unknown weathers
where beyond multiplication tables
another alphabet coalesced offshore
the widening gyre a storm
then sick again, then home. i went to kneel
near my grandmother’s gloved hands,
over roots threaded through soft beds where
she kept her beloved impatiens
and a running conversation with visiting
birds.
too late to be ancient, like whales, too late
for the soft womb of the far sea.
a creature learns the weather
it must live inside
learns to hear
them
& here
it was too late for lessons in first language but
not for the memory of how she opened
the mouth of her
o
the pore-bearers
we learned
the parallel arithmetics
of aqueous forms
anchored before mouths
spouted arguments
before proofs
where every opening
counted toward survival
we did not pursue what passed
through us
or try to map ourselves
immortal on its churn
we invited it in, all the time
& all our lives,
through collar cells
waving come in, come in
through glass our bodies
learned to stand in for
skin, through long chambers
folded inside
our wait
our skeletons chelated
by relation as the reef
entered, its hungers
& light, none of ours to keep,
only for breathing
after being pulled apart
we stilled
ourselves
back
into each other
ask us
to model strength & we answer
by collapse, opening into ever
finer passages
ask about permanence
& we will make in our deaths
a habitat
anchored where the first current
opened us awake
where though we never saw
the reef
we became
its memory
