Category: poetry

Song of Seed

Into birth.

We wanted only flesh of soil, of sky––to hold us. See us as children, planning our return. Now with our hands in the abundance called dirt, now with the earth on our faces, in our ears. Now with our dreams of flight, neverending. Until they did end, as we learned shame at the nakedness of our longings. To accept separation as a central term of continuance. To accept the terms they gave us for what this was. Such as civilization, such as fact, such as growth. But the souls––the soils that we had tasted when we held them in our hands had whispered differently: no treatise on growth or development, nothing to advance, but a call and response with the sky. Something like, here, and hear. How we had waited for our turns to call back, here! How we had sensed in our filthy guts, the wombs of all things sacred, that it was coming, and soon.

Dominions

With Time and Space and the Babies.

Time’s madness had its origins in a wrong story, the flaw magnified by the velocity of its spin. We were about to lose him. He was losing himself. His voice broke and its fragments arguing inside him were a constant racket.

Still, it seemed possible that their dissonance might resolve into music, the birth song of a new Adam, wizened by the bitterness of the strange fruit of experience, to taste with less abandon and more care, his assurance of righteousness tempered by the memory of storms that still quaked in his muscles. Any pointing he did now was a movement akin to wing-flutter or ecstatic dance, hand in flight like the feathered messenger of history blown forward by the heat of the accumulated blasts as it looks back with sobering understanding of the danger of the spark that so delighted when it came.

We liked him better this way, the wilding rhythm of him in pulses we could recognize. 

“He can play better now,” Space assured us.

“How?” We had reason to doubt. 

“Look,” she said, pointing downhill. “No history that justifies those rivers of blood can hold. If that was his organizing principle, he’s better off making less sense.”

It was true. When we laughed, he would not take offense, but would laugh back, singing our new names. He didn’t even think to tame the voices quarreling within him, and because of this they grew fond of his presence, and would sing soft songs to him when he tired of his own chaos.

And then she breathed into us, her eldest daughters, and bathed us in the waters that knew our origins and our future wombs, and it was then that we heard we, becoming.

The Hearing Shell

Leaning in.

Sheltering at the end of the last song, fingers splayed as weather comes but I want to remember radiance and rescue and first this question: what city is this and if I reach for her hand will she know me? If my mind would return to the gapped flesh of my flesh to mend itself, how far until the next note and will there be room enough? Inside us, to hold it.

Progress in Pipeline

Flow without ebb.

How to stop the rush of current pushing toward––? What is assumed to be an exit from which we can finally fall from this concrete pipe into fresh water, into sunshine, to stretch beneath the dappled light filtered through dripping trees. There is no entrance, only more volume to increase our velocity. How far until light, until water, until air? Our breath, too, is caught in the current so we hold it like our questions, like our limbs to keep from breaking.

Bird Signs

And what resists containment.

Careful to note the care of the thrush at her nest, and her attendant song, we were determined to find joy in witness. Its light would not shine except in grief, and a long record of bird notes reveals that we could scarcely see their winged grace without noting everywhere the flights and visitations of our dead friends. The substance of our trembling was never so vivid as when it flowed from us.

To Begin

With amazement.

Speak to me of ongoingness, of the atmospheric nature of objects, of astonishment; of the vertigo of finding yourself in an image with no context or memory of the moment. Let the speech of the hour open with Stop, let us weep. Let the ruins of the moment leave us pierced, undone with memory. Let the past cut a deluge into now, not to be consoled. That we remember. 

Where is the horse? And the rider. And that time. When we plunged into the cold sea, ready to lose ourselves.

What Now

The weight of what survives.

What air. What hollow light. What weeps in shadow. What receives. What mind slouches forward to be born a new god? Whatsoever is loosed here will be loosed above. What art, then? Whose? What thunder. What fire. What wrath.

[May this not end on wrath. As it does for–how many now? The count will not hold. Of these, how many too young to pronounce the word.]

What rage, what grief. Whose ears? Whoever has them, what do you hear?

What Dawn May Bring

To the missing.

Dawn, and time slides down the ache of long sight. Not blind, only blinding sometimes, having offered the eyes one at a time to visiting creatures while still unripe, like here, take it, finding relief at being done seeing what we thought we knew, finding in it only the too-muchness of what is not. But this is about how life when it grows will vine and bud around and through and within the spaces of our missing parts. So, sight returned, and our hands, holding as we walked back into this our lives, still unknown, on the unsteady limbs of newborn foals still wet with the flood of our birth.