Ben Meyerson

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.