3 poems
Dawn Again
I want to speak of bodies changed into new forms…
- Ovid
I
I want to speak of bodies
changed into new forms –
how groundwater seeps into once-empty crevices & the earth
shifts
so that the substrates
squeal & cantillate in new runs;
how wakefulness untwists me from sleep
leaves me there
& I am almost something else.
II
I want to speak of bodies
in whom the warp of alteration
finds its phase emerges & braids
with what will be –
forms in whom history
circulates ex-tract as urge potential energy
the slope that undercuts an avalanche.
Dawn again.
Dawn in eye-tufts
mastiff-hackled
declassed when lifted up:
a room enclosed
walls bronzed indemnified by light as if
cuirassed
each crack burnished over –
I will be tempted
to put it in my hand & examine it like that
sever it from its roots
& preempt its prior shape
lay down my head there
& turn away –
as if there is no more time.
As if I will not be scraped from the surface of what I hold.
III
I want to speak
but my body must forage
& feel another skin before it charts
the unkempt sprawl
to be transfigured
to accede
not to look but to be the look –
& then a stalled sonority beads up behind the collarbone:
dawn again
in feathery pulses that push
each form into itself
metastable emulsified toward singing –
& I am awake
always a tendril aquiver in the gusts
now a subphonic prosthesis
at the spot where all things torque but do not break.
The rhythm is a nascent sapling-snap
tensile where the fibers
creak a haptic schism between beat & gap –
an eked green
when the stem pushes through
& squeezes its soil into fission so that the elements part:
hege monies
disentangled but not allayed in the wrench
of repetition & birth –
a track & the foot’s pressure
untwisted where the roots knot together
there
again
& I am almost something else.
Future-Proofing
Time with you was a callus & a cocoon:
it slowed so that its circulation
petrified
in whorls & tinctured sediment –
night rested where it spread
on beds of shale & spun
silk before the sun
packed it down in sheets
& we lived among the weathered ruins
carved & grown by habits of contact
receptive to touch from within our chassis
though deprived of it.
We did not think to protect ourselves
until what was to come
arrived –
all night we took pains to be permeable
but when we awoke our breath was twine
& glacial rinds sloughed from the hillsides down
into our mouths caching silt-trails
& spume on our tongues in chalky hillocks to subsume
our saliva with grit & milled debris:
we inhaled greedily.
To speak
we dug our way underneath the detritus
then learned to frack affection
up from our lungs
& into the air between us.
Scenario
I
The river just beyond where
summer fires have weakened the slopes
debris has bulged
to the outer lip of the bank
we are stopped
something happens with gravity –
hands brush the edge of numbness
light
settles on greyscale
does not change.
In frail shade at rest
pale sun webs through foliage
mottles skin –
patterns winding in swells of breeze in
the deepening of hours a caw
from among the trees
carnage
of a rodent breaching its bush
a vulture’s loping gait above like
the languorous swoop
of a minute hand on its path.
By the river refusing time
until
hue drains from the world around us –
we squat on heedless stones over
the water watching feldspar dampen to phlegm
peering
into the copse of pines
whose trunks are ashen spars
whose needles
are smudged together like rubbed charcoal:
oneiric spires that dissolve into dim sky
humming with the cold
of other seasons –
no salve for the desire no sap
to trap what runs away.
When night arrives our eyes must adjust
to loss we must squint
for the warmth of bodies –
they respond
they make a music
we do not know it.
By night there are threnodies
that sound from corded throats
but snag on the gums and
pinch off in glottal wisps –
the dumb brush of symphonic palms on thighs
dragged skin to haul
a dawn ictus from the tar of time
and so to set things into motion:
flowers stretch until their pollen wicks rust
and curl as their stems pool
like wax into earth
new seeds
spawn thickening with age –
all we feel are petals on our chthonic tongues
though the taste
is of chalk and wet grit lapped from the river
whose current is greyed by silt
whose path is clamorous
with summer
and nameless debris;
all we hear are hours and days
tickling our nostrils like ragweed
at the tangled border of an endless field
compressing pollen to wax in our ears –
and then some chatter from underwater
from the bedded stones and the pine droppings
some mute chorus
scraping us into light.
II
On the new day
rapids effervesce in me
headlong amid organs
untrussed
fanned to a rush –
pores fulminate and slacken
history
mulls in sinew:
land is knotted around me
hunched
incommensurate
my body is midden-weight atop its pallor
muscles bunched
to trace the lag of air
skinward follicles skittering ajar in the murmur
atria unlaced into a hacked calm.
A colossal illumination
will helm
this new body into which I
dawn
parsed in implicate glow
drawn
like water from the well
slow then
streaming from form to form –
I am raised and razed back into a subject
dune-dry
rustling with current;
I am a cartridge for unextended light:
the moisture beneath baked sand
a vernal relic petrified in the glacier.
In rivulets
days drip and carve runnels
runnels widen
to tributaries
the particles skip and rush in herds
conduct sun in flecks with
the slip and sprint of their haunches
gait uneven
slabbed flanks that glint as they brim and surge against
the pasture that enfolds them
the bells round their necks
sounding daybreak and dusk through
the parched beaks of birds:
they drift on familiar paths
their current rattles the sturdy wooden fence –
chattel twisting in brusque rebellion
then shambling on its way.
We all move
to where we are going:
the body awakens into its husk
sleeps
rouses
slips between –
away from me
a crane’s whoop hammers still water
where the river gives way
to wetland;
each sun falls on the heart
like a hollow tire
slapping cement.
Ben Meyerson holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently splits his time between Toronto,
Canada and Granada, Spain. He is the author of three chapbooks: In a Past Life (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2016), Holcocene (Kelsay Books, 2018), and An Ecology of the Void (Above/Ground Press, 2019). His poems, translations and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Pank, Long Poem Magazine, El Mono Azul, Great River Review, The Inflectionist Review, Rust+Moth, and Pidgeonholes. His debut collection, entitled Seguiriyas, is forthcoming from Black Ocean Press.