ASHES
Manacled to a whelm. Asked the plants to give me my small identity. No, the planets. The arcing runners, their orbit entrails waving, and a form on a leaf, mold, bells a bower- everything transitioning- unfolding- emptying into a bit more life cell by cell in wind like this sound of scribbling on paper. I think.
I am falling. I remember the earth. Loam sits quietly, beneath me, waiting to make of us what it can, also smoke, waiting to ever more entry- I spent a lifetime entering- the question of place hanging over me year after year- me thinning but almost still here in spirit, far in, far back, behind, privy to insect, bird, fish- are there nothing but victims- that I could become glass- that after that we would become glacial melt- moraine revealing wheatgrass, knotgrass, a prehistoric frozen mother’s caress- or a finger about to touch a quiet skin, to run along it’s dust, a fingernail worrying the edge of air, trawling its antic perpetually imagined end- leaping- landing at touch. A hand. On whom. A groove traversed where a god dies. And silken before bruised. A universe can die. That we could ever have, or be one body. Then picked up by the long hair and dragged down through shaft into being. One. Now listen for the pines, the bloom, its littering, the wild hacking of sea, bend in each stream, eddy of bend- listen- hear all skins reveling, unending- hear one skin clamp down upon what now is no longer missing. Here you are says a voice in the light, the trapped light. Be happy.
JORIE GRAHAM
Courtesy of The New York Times, 13 October 2016
