Voyage, Voyager
“by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —…."--Mary Oliver
“All plots tend to move deathward.”—DeLillo
"не бояться, когда с неба падают пожары”—David Dector
All poems move deathward
so too our hearts, so too our homes
so how to ask the shadow,
the comfort of the day, the door in sprungtime,
the contrition and calm of a muscular day when the wind is a wolf
and your body, exposed to the late-in-coming December expiration, decibels and creaks,
an old boat's plank cuttles against the barnacles of the land's desire
your body etherized against the loss of the press once against your side, she
scribbles in the margins scrambling for breath and meaning--.
you will someday seek the comfort of these things surely:
dusk’s dawning in spades and pried wide spaces left unlocked
the chipped corners of winter’s building groped at
whose voice chips away exhausted,
a red blanket defiant and remaining, stitched up with poems
those fearless verbs and unconjugated emotions:
count all of them in your waiting and inside the questions,
do not be afraid when fire falls from the sky.
How to ask the shadow,
when the moon comes barking, licking up and down the walls,
the loom of the bedsheets caked up in the hip of the room’s corner
the winter that brought you back from September
that winter that brought you back from the nation’s fear
all immaterial, ungoosed breath and a wintertide tongued toward the corner light, unchained
let it all go
let lee loaned lift
let long away amid arear, a of all
the sentences we wrote upon our wrists red and blue in the dark
the clauses choked from the claustrophobia of a broken heart, grandmother once feared
all these endless alphabets, the disdained alphas and the oneiric omegas
all that mattered, once
reimagined when you picked up the frozen stick in the creek, crawfishing backward
and our life swam upstream for the first time,
the pictographs that penciled our collar bones and inked the spines,
the alphabet and algebra of the lives we voyaged from there to here,
our passages and the passengers we once were, the glowering and the gathering
the flowers picked open with our canines and the maps incisored
voyaged along the riverbank in Yilan—
lavender, orchid, plum flowers, calla lilies and the daylilies upturned and drenched
the stories speak of this life, the recipes left dry and brown in the tea tin in the red cupboard:
so too our hearts
a door in Springtime:
so too of love
so too of hearts
so too the click of selves
so too you
so to you
do not be afraid when love falls from the sky.
So now
how to ask again
the shadow to seek and share what it knew, once
of what you have seen and what has been taken away
the children who climbed the emerald mountain by the baying sea:
their conviction rang out amid the nightjars and swifts
the remains and rickshaws along the old quarter’s street--
shall we count ourselves blessed
among what remains,
the tokens in the pockets, the coins in the seat’s sleeves,
the reflections that muddied in the night of the street mirror,
grandmother’s sprouting laugh, father’s cold sandwiches left aside on Christmas in wobby bar
the stories gathered on the plates in the reservoir of the wine glasses late at night
the welkin and distant laughter
atop and amid the abiding--
neither stanza nor firmament have words for that, or for this
the fishbones plucked from the filet set out for the cat,
gawking amid winter, the light and listeners listless in their nocturnal unraveling
organs of longing thawed, the last of your vows at night and the Earth’s orbit:
so too of love
so too of hearts
so too the click of our selves
so too you
so to our hearts
so to you
do not be afraid when love fails from the sky.
How to ask the shadow to cut away the wafer hurt,
cut away the heart ache, the twinge left in the joint,
loves ligature where the forlorn listens and the audience audits their languor
their longing heeding lullaby and lament
so too of love
so too our hearts
so too the click of our selves
so too you
so to you, then:
how?
To tell the shadow, this
do not be afraid when all falls love from the sky,
cut away the heart ache, cut away
while a door in Springtime opens
and all the poems come scattering, all language toward the deathward
yet we remain
far through the distance left, alive and liquid
far through the distance left, alive
the moon in the hinge of our hearts,
the tree and the pen line forever loquacious in the snow.
for: David Dector, Chiwan Choi and Robert Black, my father.
