Blombos
“We are made of time. We are its feet and its voice.”—Eduardo Galeano
?
So, how do I begin to tell this particular story,
Numerically:
i
It began with the knotted sound of a bell wrong in a temple, the flutter of a golden silk robe and the line on an old woman’s hand who once spoke that I would live as long as a bird at sea.
The lacuna steeped inside.
And the years slip like breath along the edges of our skin, an abundance and a reckoning, the firmament spreads wide, like a gap-toothed space, dark and unending. Pitch and Pale above, all that which twined and coursed through you, comes forth like small accumulations. And then.
ii
Words, like small billows under hull, tiller the jib of my meandering thoughts. Pictures, like wisps of exhalation, rudder the carriage of my body’s hinting. I have always worked both, rhyme and flap, to set my life’s navigation right—Ballast of Boom and Keel—the steerage from which I have tried to helm my way home. A halyard in its pulling.
Let the tilt of tide shuttle inside and out. The vanquished.
iii
that voice and this then.
The Light awakens in a room. A small ache stirs—A child’s tooth,
drops.
iv
Because of you, caught in the accordion flaps of filament, aperture and click. We begin and began and then came the switching. And then, shortly then, it was there, along the edges of photographs and along the lining of the life carved from a weary body and a drought-dry mouth. Words. Sight. You. We.
And then began, alas, a verb slipped before the comma’s opening.
v
The Oxen rid of their sun ranging in the shade of the trees, the hills, the dark and then a light brush, a shadow before it has been forestalled, this swaying.
Calves, children, boys, four brothers swaying in the sun
