—

The Seafarer’s Wife

Does oblivion, too, feel like this:

yellow flames, parting into gold strands,

& what’s left of us silken, pearled

like oysters cracked ajar to some

in-dwelling eternity. & what of the

unheard warning, the thunderstrike

that came, in its dull repetitions,

to resemble not a siren nor a strike

but the absence of sound entirely.

& what we couldn’t make out of the silence,

like numb hands feeling for one last match,

became the looking glass by which we

recovered our own bodies, outlines chalked

beneath time’s brief unswerving bridges.

& wasn’t that the form the familiar took,

copper-turquoise shining in the under-dusk,

laying out language like time-honoured cutlery,

the body morphing into statuary, shield, stain.

Is this what it is to move through wisdom

& arrive somewhere opaque, unsweetened,

leaving the heart’s concentric layers

to themselves, light hitting

not darkness but more of itself.

& brightness can harm like that,

when it succeeds as much as it conceals.

& what of that wide open door,

that, from the angle you stood, seemed

at first bolted, sealed shut by some distant,

star-born law? I didn’t know you then

but I know you now as the light edging

briefly between two arcs of pitch-dark

night, a lighthouse camouflaged by white crests

& wings that tore the night into us, those

lashings of storm we mistook for low-tide.

Diorama

With our lives still covered in hiddenness,

we cannot rest our bones on the backs of the evergreens,

not with silence, ever the hunter, still thirsty for our missing parts.

Night arrives like just another symptom

of language; our spirit-shadows ash-dark

like the soil beneath a fire’s burning.

What kind of heaven would leave us undreamed of?

Us, and everything else? But heaven as we know it

belongs to a morning not yet risen from the foam of its dream,

as if heaven was a dream we couldn’t reach, although we tried,

waiting for the silence to at last pass over us

& the distance to pull us in closer like the sun-warmed arms

of a grandmother; as if love might return, trembling,

but fully-formed this time, dust-coated in the heaven we didn’t believe in;

like the diorama that locked us in, only to lock us out of it.

We have buried our own bodies in the earth where no hands

can unseal them. Now we are foliaged with our pre-memories

of holiness. Like climbing roses we are strung to our own unbidden scent,

grief the storm that floods our eyes dry. Silence, ever the hunter,

pulls old sheets of starlight across our buried backs.

But this starlight does not resemble ours. Its stars are limp & cold

& carry no fragrance. We grew our starlight out of the earth’s

green stacks, kneaded it out of cardamom & salt.

Our stars were plucked from the lyre & picked from the lemon trees

before we returned them each night at dusk.

What is death to us when silence already came here,

a half-sunk heaven strapped to its lifeless back?

 Apprentice to the Water

Is it fair to say the rain

makes green again that

which doesn’t resist losing

itself to the warm earth,

silverish beads of cosmos

tossed unevenly over it —

have I been mistaken in

imagining there is consciousness

that is not at war with itself?

Only what the near distance

sort into bands of colour,

sheltering into brief coexistence —

the night-blooming Auroras,

making what they will of what

they can— & who said that

loneliness will take you out,

eventually, if not now,

watching the salt-wash brighten

into plankton, moon-stung

into luminous rounds?

Is it fair to say that everything

comes down to this? —

this hauntedness. This how much

of yourself are you willing to claim?

That is, whatever betrayal

emptied out of you— fear, loss,

a rage unequal to its parts.

The river partitions only

what resists its quickening.

Is it fair to say that what

doesn’t match its violence

eventually matches its light?

Lachesis

Tell me, how long

is the plunge of history,

its mute dossier of light?

Are these phosphorescent

flashes only real where

memory is unfastened

from its flight?

Will I even see you

approach without first

unknotting twilight

from its strange

untimely regions?

Tell me, how long do I have

to bridge the night to the night,

to pull the moon’s steely architecture

down into the space of the body?

You say you did not spin the night

out of the granite dusk,

but there you are again,

watching the darkness sweeten

into timeliness, into eventual roses,

sieving the seasons out of

pale branches, samaras making

wings of rain-scented air.

How long will forgetting last?

Until the body, scattered and true,

bends to its own outline?

You tread hungrily through the flesh,

thumbing absence into lonely skin.

You sweep your shadows

from nature’s memory,

replace what’s lost with what’s lost.

But how long is a shiver,

a cosmic fever, rain dancing on rain?

How long will remembering last?

Until the sun is fatigued with light?

Until the summertime,

where it floods the days with

colour, also takes it away?

How long will you weave

your constellations

of dust and thorny vertebrae?

until the arc

of spring’s desire grows latent

with its restless limbs?

Tell me, who is keeping score

of the daylight, if not you?

 Tournesol

I pull the powder-blue shutters back and forth

to allow in just the right amount of sunlight

& the gesture of it, the back & forth of it,

the measuring out the too much or the not quite

enough, the drawing forth of the heavy vertical panels slanted

at just the right angle to deter the rain— imagine being

granted the work of measuring out the right amount of anything— of mystery,

of want, of days brief & quicksilvered with nothing if not their vast quantities —

of heart-ache, of dumb-luck, of numinousness.

& sometimes too much is just the right amount—like how the starling,

having mistaken glass for sky, slicked cold with its new wound,

is stunned back into its own body—the wound the exact amount of what was lacking

to round it out into fullness—How long does a wound last

you ask as if it was the question & not the answer that could determine

its length & I picture those straight Roman roads through

the French countryside, the eeriness of onwardness assured,

so unlike the winding roads in England, built first not for automobiles

but for horse-drawn carriages, roads built for startled animals, as if there’s

only so much distance you can take in at once & still endure

the unknowingness of the road, what’s hidden of it, as you herd your

own lonely animal through duration’s sun-callused fields,

shadow hamlets making tree-lines out of the sky’s low rim. & I watch

you watching the birds drunk on the dirge, feeding their music into

the air’s narrow planks & your eyes, time-worn, as if you’ve said

too much, as if you could put language down back in the place where

you found it. & I love the French word for sunflower, I say, tournesol.

As in turns to sun. And if you can’t turn, than run. Run.

O to be pulled back into life’s warm body & overcome with just the right amount

of brightness, of tournesols, of murmuration, of touch quenched from love’s thirst,

like the starlings returning to roost, as if a song, too, was something you could run out of,

had to fine-tune & sort through, as if the wound could

be closed only by measuring out the right amount of music

 Dreamstain

After Nelly Sachs

Was it the towering cumulus

that first birthed in me

this cold doubt, as if the bigger

an emotion is, the more it can hold,

the more air circulating through it,

shimmering with variations, reversals,

negations, like how there’s no peace

without first unpeace, like how grief

makes of the body a house big enough

to store its redactions, revisions, caesuras,

rooms high-ceilinged enough to shelter

a scorched heart, unrestful dreams

of time dissolving back into its root,

cyanic sky rinsing clean all sights and sounds,

uprooting light into grieftrees—

grief is just another word for

trees. & who hasn’t longed

for the world roused with sudden inhalation,

for the heart repopulated not by things

but unthings, humility’s quiet districts,

the strange perfume of night-lit forests,

gardens ripe with wordlessness

until the mind, no longer viable to the heart,

makes small miracles of certain words

—like water, like wind, like faith,

like trees uprooted in the griefwind—

grief is another word for wind

folding into us like ancient paper.

But the past doesn’t feel like the past,

more like recollections of parallel worlds

stained now with dream. & I have seen

with my own unsight the lilt of the past

liquid-needled into something resembling passage,

as if time was just another word for no-time,

like faith, a word that contains both

storm & unstorm— faith another word for

for undo faith for lose faith for faith restored

after the storm lilacs blooming into summer rain

angels fingerprinting flesh-wounds turned cold

by revelation’s slow departure—&

death, they say, is just another word for light.

The Great Heron

What has become of the fires

that goldened the days we plucked

from the darker seasons?

Were you not once made of

blue-green lakes & honeysuckle

pinked by the onrush of spring?

Did you take more than your cut

of the dawn’s feverish silence

like the sparrows overhead rounding

the minutes out into bursting suns?

As a child I read a book

about a house covered in ivy—

I, too, lived in that house,

& many other houses each

with their own scent and

bodies made of ivy

& snowfall that year

I fell in love in New York City

& the snow iced all around

my heart but my heart was

bigger & warmer that year

than an entire season of snow

& when the last blizzard passed

so did my love with it but

still I remember that ice-cold

air against my cheeks like a song

returned at last to its rhythm

long caged inside the heart like

memory’s own glow can suspend

the traffic sometimes, can stall

the earth orbiting its long,

superluminary flame — &

what do we owe time, anyway,

if not this? I thought my

heart was made of clear lines

but it isn’t, if wants nothing

more than to incandesce on

the hour—& don’t we all

want to believe that time

happened to us? Cheered us

on gladly as we sped, darkly,

though it? But how much

of this was ever ours to hold—

like the great heron launching

into sky makes accordions out of

the day’s bronzed breezes,

reminding me that the world is also this

or, does it not just wing itself

in the direction of something like

fate, but loosely, as if having

not yet hatched out of its own mystery,

or, more likely, never quite learned

how to separate its own reflection from

whatever flickered warm inside of it.

What became of that house of ivy,

of trains silking through some

golden premonition of Autumn,

of returning the following Autumn

to find tiny specks of gold salting

the earth as I watched myself,

or was it you, falling radiantly

through that roughshod wilderness

we call the world, its dark ligature

loosening around the body as it falls,

headlong, into its own memory

of falling. Does any memory

require other memories to hold it up?

Otherwise does it drop, or fall,

like light streaming into more light

like a burning star does it just grip its life

onto the sky’s slowly bluing stem?

 Statue of a woman, restored as muse

The hills of her prospect

were only ever the semblance

of hills. In them there was no ascent.

No purpled vine, no possibility of a starling.

On a clear day an equinox

of liquid silver emerges at arms-length.

She is framed by its light,

though it is a light she never asked for.

She could throw a stone across the

water’s fine translucent pulse

but she would not hear it splash.

In its mirror she dreams of manganese.

She kneels beside the boy.

Won’t you return with me

to these ancient towers, she asks,

this half-done heaven?

Won’t you break for it, as I do?

She is covered in gold rain.

Her eyes still burn their original flame,

hang their fire across its sublime bridges.

Where her outline burns into abstraction,

the definitions of the body soften.

The pigment houses something

like an oversoul. The lines resemble

the deep tread of time, its breathwork.

From the ceiling leaks a still heaven

from which it draws a permanent radiance,

bends the brute arc of time.

Does she recall the parts of herself  

that are unfleshed? What the light hits it bends.

What is unmoved remains in shadow.

She arrives slowly because she prefers

the shadows of that hour. How

the light fills the mosaic floor.

Here her likeness reveals its arms,

its touch. Inside her

an emotion encounters distance.

The walls of her lucent towers were

neither green nor mauve,

not that that ever mattered.

It was a question of interiority.

She walks instead toward the terrain of memory,

feet painted with the ecstasy of the earth.

She knows herself through the burning.

Eventually her shadow is stitched to the moonlight.

It pierces her, though she will never recall it.

She will begin again as colour.

Behind her the mountains have ashened.

In them she finds no new colours.

Has the well of heaven run dry?

She mistakes desire for matter.

She filters it through blue rain.

When she turns back her colours have frescoed.

She is redone as spectacle, as stone-carving.

In her prospect the earth has recovered

its dream of a candescent field.