19 Fragments of Youth, Athirst
"Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?"--Whitman
IX: 2014
The light of the Buddha's arms in the outstretched cave in Taiwan,
the carving of ink against rock,
the walk like the shifting, slow and surfeit, of surf over sand,
the light in the morning before you unflag into light,
the rhyme unfurled before the syllables sound,
my father's map both before and after he had set to flame,
the horse's cantor,
the turtle's turn under sugar cane,
the solving of equations without polynomials,
the 'we' inside the ewe's bleat.
the joining and the shearing,
alight.
You.
X: 2014
When I held his hand for the first time, i understood
how buoyant weight watered and coupled in opposition,
fingers bowed like a cat’s cradle
and weaving
the lessening of gravity's draw,
the pull and tug of angles and reflections convexed,
that special joinery that strengthens and relieves
the falling away and apart.
anchored when the stories coupled in the shape of shadows or fingers
or different languages lifted like kite string let go.
and I knew:
Gravity shall not, even pully'd over horizon, dissipate,
yet in its pivot and divestment bares and releases strain
and each night the tension candles its kilos into wisps of a word or a found hair,
the curlicues and syllables between our teeth in the morning:
the burning and combing of each:
organ, calcium, dendrite, lace and dream,
all that which lends lip and loss between our silences
the clicking of the letters of his name and mine,
ink key snapping against thin paper
the promises between the knees,
the abacus and the ruler and the carpenter's tool:
all that, our method and our medicine.
So I followed the movements, when I lept over a southern sky
and there and there and there, we grazed the ineffable:
name, body, story breath like frost against glass,
a settling before the breakage
all the ghosts that had run in
and all the simple picking-up-of-things
that became our constellation and calligraphy,
my father had taught me to burn
but he had not taught me to plant
from ash
what can be grown from the loss of long timber.
That I learned on my own
not from the burned maps
but from the putting-together of us, we
The wax and weave of the joinery and the yew.
