Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
When did I learn the word “I”?
What a mistake. For some,
it may be a placeholder,
for me it’ s a contagion.
For some, it’ s a thin line, a bare wisp,
just enough to be somewhere
among the gorgeous troublesome you’ s.
For me, it’ s a thorn, a spike, its slimness
a deceit, camouflaged like a stick insect:
touch it and it becomes what it is:
ravenous slit, vertical cut, little boy
standing upright in his white
communion suit and black secret.
Air as lost time
Voice of a cloud, of a ghost crowned with nimbus
Smack-thin, it lingers forty years
I thought it came from the jeweled world we’ d seen
Everything stuffed, urgent, glittering alive
But it was just pleasure, blank and sure
Now what is there to sing
From speakers, the tune folds and fades in waves
Earphones drive it through your head
A charm,
a dream of protection.
Gurgles hold the night light’ s glow.
A stream of clouds
misting the branching tubes.
Water, in fog, a tub, plug to
wire in the wall saying
Okay, it’ s okay all night.
* * *
“Burnished,” when applied to limbs,
refers you to furniture, or wood
at least, a hint the skin has been burned
beyond the human, & then beyond.
Necessary for the removal of skin
from a burnished limb is an implement
sharper rather than duller, wieldy
& willing to dig without displacement.
The scrape of flint on a burnished limb
— if you say “arm” you must mean it —
resembles, no doubt, a chisel (of iron?)
that furls what’ s before it, away.
— Pretty Shield,
Medicine Woman of the Crows
transcribed and edited by
Frank Linderman (1932)
All night I am the doe, breathing
his name in a frozen field,
the small mist of the word
drifting always before me.
And again he has heard it
and I have gone burning
to meet him, the jacklight
fills my eyes with blue fire;
the heart in my chest
explodes like a hot stone.
Grayscale breath on a fluid
field, with lo-fi
rainpatter — petrol blue — ,
a 60-watt sun uns
-crewed from the
woebegone sky: rip-
rap & coal slurries,
dragline & loess, what phosphor
-us is a semaphore
for, silklike
in its acoustic shadows
Had death not had me in tears
I would have seen the barges
on life's stream sail.
I would have heard sorrow songs
in groves where the road was lost
long
where men foot prints mix with other men foot prints
By the road I wait
"death is better, death is better"
came the song
I am by the roadside
looking for the road
death is better, death is much better
Had death not had me in tears
I would have seen the barges
I would have found the road
and heard the sorrow songs.
That night he came home, he came unto me
at the cold hour of the night
Smelling of corn wine in the dawn dew.
He stretched his hand and covered my forehead.
There was a moon beam sparking rays in particles.
The drummer boys had got themselves a goat.
The din was high in the wail of the harvest moon.
The flood was up gurgling through the fields
Birth waters swimming in floods of new blood.
He whispered my name in far echo
Sky-wailing into a million sounds
across my shores. His voice still bore
