WHAT WE REMEMBERED BEFORE
A face climbing
atop an old
starter motor,
buried down
and spit-taken
ahead of slender
white ether gloves and
parade sheets pulled
over and beginning to
absorb the leaded
ground. Given way
again to
another incendiary thin
sprawl but never
again, a word
that means a
finger tracing the
paths along the arch
of skin near any
finger other than your
own: a set of known
hands soldered together
that even heated will
begin to crown.
Fixtures that break against the ice: moon
light parches a dry throat to
choke and stall out. In way before ash,
we heard vibrations of soil we reached
into, a shaded space beyond your
mouth that gives growth to others.
As a memory
just as it was done before
clearings came. Another sensation that
comes in when otherness vacates. A descent
and catching the hands in an escape
pose, bringing brickarms
to spin into another form so
brilliant the eyes retract into
their holster. Rearranged
to form new compounds
built on the generations
of freedom we
rebelled from,
the glass lip tasted
but prevented from
blistering under a
skin we've already
known. The next
year is always easier
than this one but I
realize I'm expected
to speak in projections
that never seem
to clear the teeth
utterly.
This sequestration, our lungs alighting in
series to develop
a texture its own,
a stigma we designed on time divided. Out pasture
ignition point, the right mixture but rich
with air or ventilated improperly. The
gaze we have again. In
the pressured moments beyond
this one, we'll seek
against and filtrate our
devoured like a steadied destruction
we cannot believe, alleviated
before us. In the summer the
ships go through
the bridge and
we hear a cantilever of
swallowed dusk
reintroduce it to a
native, painted earth. We
were what we ought to
have been all a-
long, not just a
reminder of the room
before the
reverberation. This tipped
another time
without being heard,
satisfied to
fear. Where we were
is against a wall too
tall to hold
us backwards in an
ocean. A dream too
buried by dirt
to carry another
feeling alongside
it. Split along a
vein, adequate again, I
know. This or
any justification to
breathe alone in your
reference besides
the terror that
seethes through
an absent language. An
absence sustained through
notion, anything matter lacks
it collects as prey, a retraction.
If anything that is unseen shows
the depth of another shift,
we'll realign ourselves to be
any different kind of
place which cannot remain
whenever an unheard system tenses and
recovers. Our tract, re-purposed to
begin in seas of
matter— axon, a
being. Let the litmus be our light
ahead. Your back arcing there
somewhere, a little exposed but
I cover my eyes to
unsee you and cover my arms so that I
may undeceive. Say the same thing
you always say to everyone else but say
it to the gathered room. In
memory, speech
begins as a seed
piercing. The things we are begin in
a spark from
a hand and out again, covered,
mistaken and divulged as
certainty.
Weaned hour, deplored moment on
the way to another envelopment. Bray
above a roar
to sound inflexible, really,
and putting recognition
on. Regain
a swollen block where
we will to unknow,
move about the surrounding
spaces. A light out on
a stair
well to
ascertain we
begin again, a glow too
welcoming to speak
through. Though the air
seems to push us, it's
a retribution from sin. After
worry resolves, it
plays, ringing in and over
where everything that
can grow
does not. If
our floods are the same, I hope
what we know is masked by
shame and brings sense back
to the land we settled.
[NOTE. Amish Trivedi has for some time been a close associate at Poems and Poetics, some of his earlier work having appeared in the postings of February 25, 2011 and October 7, 2012. In the present offering he steps forward as a poet working at full capacity, to create, like the best of us, a poetry that tests his & our furthest capabilities & fears. I wait to see what follows with great anticipation. (J.R.)]
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