Ere Long
Who would awaken from the bright means—
from an idleness inside the havoc of August
into the slack gutturals of autumn harnessing
everything at its vanishing point—
and be seen catching each fluctuation at the moment
we want to inhabit it
only to inherit the vacancy at the center of a promise?
What watermark, what chime or thistle might draw out
this pain, binding me to...
Barley water, and sheaves, are things I'd bring her
(as she awakened among birds with hidden wings)
and would I find, in the measure of those pinioned
wings, the whole form of desire?
Statue, feather, summons (stain the ground red
with ocher to stimulate a fast rebirth—)
And woods are in the asking: I ate from the timbrel,
I drank from the cymbal, I carried the kernos,
I passed beneath the pastos.
Petitions, celebrants, initiates, Eleusis—
***
And then I walked after the summer's surge
along the spillway, along the channel dug,
along the possible horizontal sea floor, in the luxury
of long, exposed fractures. I watched people getting them
on film with hand held cameras—concentrating on
the stresses in the brittle sedimentary strata—
seeing in the once soft limestone the abundant
and the preserved (hexagenaria, crinoids) that accumulation
(calcium carbonate) in one afternoon,
in an hour (irregular compaction) loosed
and flooded with what the corrupted structure reveals:
the vanishing point of soil, in a few minutes,
(atonal stutter) and fossils, here in their double continuation
(formed) (seen), in the washing away
that's become the visible temperate.
***
After the water, I heard her atoms in me,
diffuse, in my body. I thought of this (at the time) as belief—
the molecules stilling in me, as fast as the inaudible—
a trace of her voice.
And I would that she reached us, each of us, this way, after,
making me entire in my waiting
as I was taken, in that moment, by her progress through
the interrupted promise—
where she begins again in me
at my vanishing point, in my idleness
by the river, near its justice, its ashen means—
Apophatic
Low-tide shoals flat-lit
and contused.
The night’s bittersweet and phosphorous
like a gravitational imprint
(force and matter no different in the end...).
Traffic’s quarrying its margin—
all arrival and Lethean assemblage—
antiparticles ribbing the ink-wet shallows
(earlier, in daylight, a squall of gulls).
Blacker now, until the mild stars begin
to turn inside the nonluminous matter—
in the governing sea of neutrinos—
***
(Stay awhile in me)
(All that I ask is that my error last...)
***
In the void
some sacrifice—
some wildness beginning
to thrive—
***
I watch the tide drift into partitions,
mutely in the marshes—
its absorption and dispossession
of the inlet, the stars, the palisade
of cars starting up around me—
***
Then a gale, all edge and factual aftermath
begins over the buoys and wild hibiscus
(replicas in an ocean’s slur and graphitic
wreckage—
that immersion in which you were always
lost to me—)
and then over the waters of the earth that will not
remember us.
