Quickening: Family Notes

From: The Common Flesh:2003

5: Intimations

           what is this phrase
uncurling itself

           the trees are silent
and winnow the sky
with gnarled hands

           the birds sing
but their song
only deepens the silence

Divinations

VI

You open the blue gate
in the wall of stone
and  pass through the dense
birdhaunted forest

the rhododendron drops
its scarlet tongues
through the heavy green perfume
of rotting earth

and the branch which snapped
under your swinging thigh
is falling again
into the distant summer

VII

In the simple gardens
the orchards of hair and sweat

mesmeric with apple and beehum
where birdbreath tunes its delicacies

and the skeined senses tumble out their embroideries
the eyed wing, the amphibian tongue, the feathered hand

stone loosens its speech

VIII

The swallows too are bending the light
calling the blossom out of the frost
with their precise magnetic eyes
and wings of articulate hunger

out of the panic and twittering
emerges the sun and the splitting cell
shapes an eye for its mirror

and children with voices of water
carelessly inhabit the light
time for them is a bird
piping its promise on the edges of sleep

where soon the bitter ghosts will stand
like bodies of rain in the falling light
of a sunless garden

From: Attempts at Being: 2002

Attempts at being

i

inexplicable fire

surges flame into flame its blue
whip trawling deeps of skin
       for tongues lit
to nerveflesh

throat after throat
       claws to its coronal

ii

brief spring tempests

a single drop
at twigtip
glanced by sun
to eyebright

muteness
breathing in

a kind of song
crude enough

for ears to see
clearly

iii

neither too far nor too within
nor too immense nor too intangible

grass that smells
of human damp
where lovers were

magnolia
              agitated by the thrust
       of a small bird

the globe trembling
through its gravid course

neurones quick with
such music
       as shakes out angels

From: “Theatre” by Salt Publishing-2008

 All Souls Day 
 
The dead have come to visit.
I don't know who they are.
They mark the glittering streets
With footsteps of rain.
The last leaves of autumn
Are their lost hands.  I
Can almost hear their voices, 
A rumour of wind and water.
My chest shakes like a window.
I have nothing to give them.
When I show them my hands
They turn away, disappointed.
Their eyes see through walls
To irrevocable horizons. I 
Do not know their names.
Their breath beats in my arteries
Like ash, like earth, like rain
Which will never stop falling.
Their injuries taint my mouth
With a taste like blood.  I
Breathe their sour bones. 
I do not know what they want.
They seep into every cell
The purities of their lack.
Knowledge crumbles against them
And pours into a vast river
Where I am nameless. 
The dead have come to visit 
Hungry as birds in winter,
Enclosed by mortal grief
As light encloses a gesture
In darkness.  I do not know
If it releases them.
Only the living are sad.
Dona eis requiem.

this moon sings
along the bones of me 
each edge absolute 
when my fingers open
the waters spill 
words curl into air
dreaming of mouth
scythes of muscle  
and in that other sky
a knife poises
its black vacuum 
 
***  
 
this moon pries
all secrets open 
inside is black 
the oyster pearl
hacked from the sea-wet
waiting lips 
absolute blade
wait for me 
 
***  

in the dry country
you dream of petals
snow and milk 
under your hand
the rock bleeds 
under your hand the rock
is learning to sing 
when you wake
from this long dream
you will bless the stone 
you will bless the word that flows
through your mouth and your ears
the phantom print of your hand
that fades from the window 

from Translations from Nowhere 
 
surely you were here before, somewhere before you
a goodly earth you’d heard about in stories,
a justness that eludes you now, a half-heard song 
who said the word that led you here, what is this knife
that cuts and cuts, a radio breaking the distance,
or is it the trees again, how they deliver
precise dissections of sky, but never a stillness, always 
the world, naked as usual, thick with meaning,
and now it makes you so weary, how it dissolves
like eyes in water or the trees that sing by the white road
moving and moving their dead branches 
something led you here, it must have grown
out of a word, a moment, maybe how the light
fell on your hands one evening as they lay, bereft of law,
outside you, a tender yellow light without horizon 
and you stared at a cup on the table, which was suddenly heavy,
the traffic too loud in the twilight, or was it some slow
forgetting, a burden that one day filled you
with hopelessness you hadn’t known was yours
until it claimed you, your dumb double, grinning
as it beckoned you, you didn’t know 
and you stumbled into this light which is like blindness
someone put the road here but left it empty
only the crows are alive, shaking the trees
with their heavy ironies, maybe they watch you
idly, but they are going on with their own business,
as someone somewhere switches off the radio 

(Freely constructed from a letter by Sor Juana de la Cruz) 
 
the letters of the good mothers
are drenched in secular eloquence
if all the limbs of my body were tongues
I could not publish such excellence 
they do not hasten to condemn
deformities of the human heart
yet ambition may become a woman
muliere in silentio discat 
the properties of a hare may briefly
make a woman handsome
but I would rather ungreased hinges
and the study of declensions 
osculatur me osculo
oris sui decrees the Song
if lips were letters I could more straitly
be given to wondering 
for this pure grammar of kisses
may express a pious verity
that mitigates the condemnations
of lascivious sorority 
if a harp can cure a king's sickness
then song may heal my sin
I merely lust to follow studies
that are celebrated in men

Published in The Blue Gate :1997

From Cuneiforms

moontree, shaking out your moths
into warm currents

brushing here a harp, there
tympanies of skin

now a clutch, now a swarm,
now a flight of lips

constellations
flaring in the blood