The Swallow
A note about this poem: a group of verses marked with a letter like this [a] signifies a section of multiple choice. Read one verse from that grouping, then move on to the next section.
i remember them: the Swallow. dashing into hearth
all a-sweat in our bed:
dear poetics of space,
bound in dusk & musk &
[a] stomach pouch. swaddled like babe
in the roots n reeds. made of mud & clay to bear out
the lone of cold months. made sense by kerfuffle; by for to
[b] heart-bones
like Swallow should. curling claws across
your collarbones. feathers thick & dissolving.
till fertile (soil)
blood pumps out like gulps of stolen wine.
here: lacks, only lacks,
in god-tongues. ah,
bring air into these wooly lungs of want. bafflegab (w)restle-
-rrect me; i will tech this
(earth-comfort, babe-big love)
architect-thing, rhetorical
[c] metamorphoser. i am (my destiny’s engineer;
i will zone for failure) tender enough to slip
a new ow in your body. here i change, watch:
unlar/tch these hours from an embodied & dash
between desire & ability. would that it were
[d] north-star thing, embodied thing.
formed by 1 bloodish body, inhabited through many
a yawp & cry too transitory, too
[e] babe. a future i might live. virtue i might call my own.
i am stretching my veins into the sky, wanting to mimic
the air-fullness of the Swallow. but every road leads
to you leads to me, & how am i to delete myself? confine myself to rummage
like roots in the dirt of tragedy? this is
transitory, this desire & ability. ah. the thing
dreamt-so-deep she enveloped in air. we
dreamt-so-deep we locked to life & duty.
memory acts out the parts we miss – clinical –
heteroglossic – suture. loss of our love-lihood
dreamt-so-deep we enveloped in air.
finding your hands in collapse & trauma
is to choose (thrall
in sense-thick postures)
[f] – still the Swallow said it(’)s lyric, the art of perishing. maybe
that’s the point. everything(‘) totaled an affront to ‘the gnawing
tooth of time’. pock-holed to holy in the penumbra of dappled light.
ah, decay is my extant form
of living; we could not end you in any real way (as if
there’s more to pain than hurt);
i suffer, therefore i am
[g] (Love a second
glance we will not need
like vega
agape at the rolling of heaven shouldered by walking blue mountains
ripe) child – now tangled
in sorrow at the back of my throat.
still, i cannot heave my heart on the page
& bind it there, nor can i pierce it
finally with my sharp pen. i cannot fill chambers
& chambers (rooms
you would inhabit) with ink, a thing
i have reason now to love, &
[h] & analog memory. your sacred wilds.
gods, i didn’t have a clue & grief
furnished the moment, cupping the world
in their fat pouch &
analog memory
too machined to be human. i’m unbolting this code
so dogmatic it howls. oh why, why
does Grief inhabit my body? why
does Grief Swallow
my body this way,
transgressive & hot? – like the Canti-
[i] -lever to my Being, like the greasy black engine of light.
proto-Grief, breathless moment, gobbled the lotus-stuff of dreams –
glugged the fleet wind of repetitious faults & traced one. raw line
through my trunk to my dole-or-hooded roots:
[j] -lever to my Being, like the greasy black engine of light.
proto-Grief, breathless moment, gobbled the lotus-
stuff of dreams – glugged the fleet wind of repetitious
faults & traced one raw line through my trunk to my dole-or-hooded roots –
[k] -lever to my Being, like the greasy black engine of light.
proto-Grief,
breathless moment,
gobbled the lotus-stuff of dreams – glugged the fleet
wind of repetitious faults & traced one:
raw line through my trunk to my dole-or-hooded roots –
like a song
bird, womb-free & -unforseeable in void.
thus the Orb Weaver: here,
finding rapture & fray in life. i am
un-made once again
to unexpurgated whole
where life happened (for so long
i pulled religion from the little
peace) by piece
and found solace in parting
from the lovely ocean of loss
to both of you:
ah!, this can’t be it, this can’
