when your poem has its mask with
drawn when
guile stands silent and when
the truck of many voices
shakes the bear of wisdom this
when your poem shucks its mask
when time
begets another time as we
and as you when your poem
annuls its mask withholds &
gives
we stole the shadow
we stole the shadow of my ancestral
tombs; we became as gods we tried
to leech the final sound off the
pallor of the living ground and we
slept as the shallow seeds of an
aftermath resounded with clarity, and
we stole the shadow of my ancestral
tombs; we culled each minstrel’s hark
and say we stole the sounds & ran
—-
to clinch the remainder of servitude
to clinch the remainder of servitude to
bleach the dawn
gray this premonition is goading surrender
this reminder
to sew the drain clean as in the wash of
my gullet’s dark
we fly inchwards borrowing your sorrow making
mine peace with
this dust
i.
the deep of my ground is sound
ed with
no pen no stalk of each new; we
whistle
we stalk we dance the ground &
bury; a
lone whistle is sound this deep
this un
approachable distance where riot
keeps a
wary watch
ii.
what is one to make of
beads past summer spring
hails the cloud to make do
the mountain makes do to
sing we call the watchwoman
and ask her to sing spring
the stream makes do what
is one to make of this valid
thrust of spring stream cloud
iii.
i have gone past the unlit moon,
the shuttered
mast giving red its color, the
waste of each
night’s marrow becoming more; i
have been touch,
solved the curvature of the unlit
moon and stood
unmoored as the whistle of rust
calls my name, &
i remember.
iv.
This is the rumble of the
firepan
the bleached mouth wanting
the sun
and its molars stretched
as shine
how will the moment believe
in this
here and this panned out
horror
v.
Absence is pretending to fit
in silences it is goading the
Rite to speech and failing suitably,
floating in mid air the flit
Of a ravine and its midflight recall –
the bird of harm hones in & whiles
This bleached night is a sparrow’s song
and home this
Furthest of form, article, pretense: a
grip on time we
Stray on the fictions of an undiluted
lie and streak
The night white with pain we dig these
trenches and flee
—
Poet’s Epitaph
He sang until his death
singing close to his eyes
to his true life, his real life of lies;
and to remember till he died
how it had lied, his unreal life of truth
– Muriel Rukeyser’s translation of Octavio Paz’s poem
—
Why so loyal to a worldview which
Shrinks your
Space are they good people? Why
So crumbling
In deference to so many potted stances
Have their hearts
Spoken anything true of late?
my full song has yet to be
born but it
was sung yesterday and it
will be sung
tomorrow my first song is birthed by wood, stone and
participle it was sung before and will again my loud
song is silent, but silence is dawn, and it has your roots.
___
The mouth saying nothing. The air saying live and die.
The womb saying welcome, the sun saying Dare.
– Muriel Rukeyser from ‘Unborn Song’
___
this cot of unsong/birthed
with revel this
brood of a long slant of edged faith this crime
yes
this crime teaching further buds to unburden the crime
this cot yes
this cot of unsong flame
You mark this song, this horror Of syllable as eye Witness to impalpable harm, ex Nihilo crucible of Further waste - turn now, read The shades of hade
He is forever trapped
who suffers his own waste.
Rain leaching the earth for lack
of roots to hold it
and children who are murdered
before their lives begin.
– Audre Lorde
Whatever cries and changes, lives and reaches
Across the threshold of sense; I know the piercing name;
– Muriel Rukeyser
-i-
to tremble is to gather
sight, plenitude of
evidence – mostly ash but
nonetheless mathematically
tractable, computable, function
of sense, eye and hiss –
redeeming vision from talking
too much, plagiarizing time
-ii-
From the furthest away tranche you gather
Root from the slant
Of the perched icicle you tremble from
The least perceived
You ask if roar is hid from the wiles of
A reeked air you beg
we reach in words
a steel bank
a rimed percolate we reach
in words
a bible truce im
maculate slouch where the
green greed of
terror builds
The dream on land last night built this boat of death
but in the suffering of the light
moving across the sea
do we in our moving
move toward life or death
– Muriel Rukeyser
I trundled feather, am done,
Will begin as love’s
Craft sheathing watchful fleece-
Another bearing of
Fear as it says word, bit and the
Dark rum of a doubled
Noon
Gathering just-a-bit-o moss 