CHIMERA
"Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember”--Seneca
"But what is grief, if not love persevering...."
A crescent moon dangles on the lip of the late-bit night sky as if a finger nail
Shorn away by the bite of a nervous god
And there you are
Standing breath large and explaining, counting the paces between the spine of the horizon’s distance
And that, all of you, which is the all of your twin, taken in:
This sway.
Between the tunnelled inhalation of sight and the parabolic exhalation of imagination:
You breathe to recreate the world, you inhale to make it rhyme anew.
You reimagine the fluidity of exhalation as much as your genes and
You make up for in how you hold yourself and shadow as the vapour of boiled tea
Of how you hold yoursel in the mirror in the dispassionate and forlorn night.
The small elipse of re-membering, the quibbled itching of your hope,
Once rubbed upon your thumb like the earth printing itself upon you in the garden
The soil, the broken, cheap pots born without negotiation standing in line,
The bruise of the spanner took facilely handled
And the forefinger and the world grown anew, fecund--
This doodle of testament and gospel and our dividing selves.
You still haunt me, and I tuck the taste of your thumbs from the dirt
Inside everything I taste and share in the syntax of stories.
Are we not divided and reconfigured by the attempt to re-puzzle all that marked us, scar and scent and stellation of home.
Remember,
Once, among the green hills and the patient land, you believed in the entire geometry of our life.
Your taught me that, the accumulation of what shivers through us
Just as your falcon had taught you of the underbrush in the woods squirrelling
And and and, what else: the ticking and the tocking: your counting and the beauty
of how you held utensils and breathed upon them to remind you of you wished to see.
Once, again, there was that lantern, the body of ghostly incense, your voice in my ear,
Your tears bowing, dilating the floorboards of the world,
The phosphorus stuck in your mouth at birth, the element
You, unstilld, incandescent and still pivoting: taste that.
Once again, later in our memory, you pointed to the milky moon, wearied of its blue-spectral brother, and whispered:
There, both of us, will you remember this years from now
Cottonseed breath, the netting of that summer night windowed by the dampness of the green hills.
And then you asked: “what shall we do with your ashes when you depart?
For in every glass, in every sway of light and sound, I see your bones aged,
The ribs of your smile, the teeth of our skin spread between our embrace-s
Wide in one another’s care, of which became you: and eventually us.
Two unrooted tuber branches inside each other’s urn.
And then, in that green night you spoke, forever, when you said,
While we tango'd together beneath the night's light and gazebo bronzed by rain,
"Do not forget the puzzles to be solved by children during Lantern Festival,
And their faces lit by the incandescent sun of the swaying red moons of flickered paper--
A balm on the bruise of the night--
That your voice is like history strung over this verdant hillscape-
The alphabet of your becoming and
The reflection of bewilderment and its solutions" and then again you spoke:
"I too shall flower through the loss and the leave of all this.
But
This is what you birthed in me,
This is what you meant to me"
Buckled by a pause and it did come into this.
We were of a twinned sense and we rose
Alight.
For: Christopher Mantrop and Wan-lin Young
