*
Chemical burring of the tongue.
Good to be on the other side
of treatment for now.
We scroll on. Would a codex restore
the balance of recto and verso.
Take up the book. Dreams luminous
in anticipation of the alarm.
When it comes, how dark and modest waking is.
*
Reading the news, waiting for sleep or the night to pass, tap of rain on the window unit, desk of unfinished work in the next room. X the painter has died. Images in my hand of the enormous faces she painted, the cause of death in narrative paragraphs, all the world of representation compressed on the screen.
Why retell the stories of those before us? They already spoke them, or held their tongues—fell silent. A lifetime to overcome the prohibition not to. But the lens is all wrong these days. I’d thought it a sunset, a sketch, told again as all sunsets are. To say something sincerely yet inauthentically is the danger. And Eliot struck “Ode” from the first U.S. edition of his poems to prevent his mother from seeing it.…
What prompted that thought? Body does not want to sit up just yet. One two one two go the taps. The child stirs—light herewith emitted in the dark.
*
In search of a medicinal hour. Hortus:
sitting at the café with apple cake
while garden-goers stir the gravel path.
Compacted here, luxuriant trained growth
of teaberry, gentian, trumpet vine,
comfrey, field restharrow, &c.
Our apothecary ancestor with his liber ingressus
token entered here to gather the herbs
for infusions that were to aid the unwell
caught in the far gone far alone glance
of mortality, moving the clock hands
from one hour into the hour.
Who is there now to announce the triumph
of hope? But by and by, after
seeds have been scattered, stirred and covered over,
blossomed, gathered, dried, crushed. Hot, late afternoon,
bees crossing bees and white butterflies.
*
“Death closes all.” Yes. But were they granted
anything, none know beforehand,
breath going out for a decade,
returning in a century,
while those gathered there fall out of
their own pockets, or is it
the count and rhythm, unable
to fix a mark or a lover’s thought
at the moment when the face of the encounter
became knowledge completed.