Fear me, For Under My Wing the World Will Come to Harm
I.
Cora walks in shadow
crushed leaf
in her hand.
Her fingers
little tentacles
open outward
to reveal its ink
its scent of green
its coracle on a river spinning
carrying leaves
from the interior.
II.
Kitchen
hearth
kettle
with metal flaking
drifting to the floor.
Listen to the sound it makes:
th
th
th.
The dust grows thick.
Kettle grows thin until
the silence held inside
touches the silence of the kitchen.
She’s written many elegies.
Little scrolls.
Tied them with string.
They lie on the table.
Odalisque
On his tongue a grain of sand
extracted from the oyster’s delicate folds
to spare her repose.
So
she sleeps
her secretions turning instead to the opalescent dreams
common to her kind.
There she sees him
floating in the nether
teeth gleaming
tearing the flesh of lunulata
adorning himself
with its treasure of rings bereft
of their vivacious poisons.
Merrow drifts in the fluvia
ah mon coquille he says
heaps his prize around her like stars
around a quiet moon who sleeps only.
She sleeps only.
She dreams of sand wakening on her mantle
while he surfaces
a pearl on his tongue
which he brings to wakening
only far above
her.
Miri
Each lark rises from the gorse
steadies herself
skates away.
Each time
I remember:
he is dead.
He is dead.
Each trill of wing reminds me:
he is dead.
I must be told a million times a day to remember properly.
It’s true.
A feather
one note of a song
falls to the grass.
And for a moment
when it touches
each its own silence
each its own fallen-down stillness
each its own small sleep
for a moment
I forget
until the next lark chimes
and my throat goes hollow with sick
and he is dead
again and he is dead
all day long.
Memory
Reason
Instinct
Still in a terrible way I am fix-
éd
by my skull
to a large mass
with its own eyes.
To go over
by vessel
is a holiday – synchronic oscillation.
Little waves little dreams
with only half sleep (all boats).
Is there a sound do you think?
If you really listen.
I mean
they say there are little waves.
They must make a noise
moving against
melodic recall: reeds, flakes
bloodhorseestuaryput the baby down
move through the grass.
(theta mix of visions that
kind of gentle
dreams the eye sees
between wakefulness and
sleep when one can say
this
is a dream
imagine a wooden boat
floating on a stream
dandelion seeds
willow branches
a big shining disc of moon
floating your fingers trailing touching its rim).
I remember that because it made me arouse.
I remember that because it made me happy.
I remember that because it made me love.
I remember that because it made me sorrow.
I remember that because it made me desire.
Charlie Birch
We are very small but we are profoundly capable of very very big things.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Steven Hawking is inside my mind
watching suns dissolve.
He finds nothing that can’t be described
with tiny spirals.
He draws them with his teeth.
If I could find a way to explain his little diagrams
the way they burst into antique fires
extinctions
then the universe would take its proper shape.
But trees grow. In other words
things move.
6 Tankas regarding Armand Schwerner
1. Opposition Is True Friendship
I am the serpent
Solve et Coagula
(I have the magistery)
et habebis ma-
gisterium. I am the
poisonous egg of nature
doing and undo-
ing, doing and undoing
my words are the fire
my death will end the poem
and darkness will flee from you
symbols carry you
away from the finite world
to the infinite
awaken intimations
divine interpretation
2. Transliteration
transliteration
Sumerian translation
spawned the beginning
privileged interpreter
between black and white spiders
3. Transliteration II
break the poet’s voice
to a thousand shards of glass
Space inside the poem
the precondition for a
perception of infinity
4. Icon And Poem
pictographic past
hypertextual present
the mysterious
interstices between prose-
prose and poem-poem or
5. (symbol omitted) SPHARAGRAM OF AMBIGUITY
(symbol omitted)
childbirth (symbol omitted)
hand (symbol omit-
ted); then there are invented
forms: LOSS OF ENERGY; DEATH,
scholar translator
through our sensorium we
consume the world through
our gaze we consume the world
we apprehend reality
6. Maybe There Are Other Ways Of Experiencing These Matters
through our objective,
high-tech methodologies
we have access to
strata of reality
unavailable to our subjects
Chartres Street
It is unseemly
this flock of moss nesting on a tree branch
roots twisting through oyster shells and
the streets are broken with them.
Broken beads hang from telephone wire spinning like coins
fading like feathery costumes and mardi gras songs.
Leaves on a pepper bush tiny white peppers tiny
along a fence screen door front porch old
man in a crickety chair says go ahead
eat one
and laughs quiet.
One bite and you’ll forget your mama he says one bite
and the whole world flashes white on your tongue.
Fills up your soul.
Soft hot sun and grandma
splits a chicken bone to show me
the river of souls running through it.
Burn it down, son, she says and she lays
the chicken bone down
beside the clutch of gray hair
she pulled from her neighbor’s head
over a pound of butter.
Shreds of grey hair in her teeth.
Here dey come, she say and go inside.
The little boys dance sweet and
sexy banging buckets and coffee cans
and one real snare drum right
past her house after school.
She goes inside and gets nickels to throw.
Most days
they sparkle like shells in the sun.
All content copyright 2007 by Beth McCormack . Web design by Beth McCormack
