I cut lines of ink as I read through the night.
I imagine the margins1 on pages are slim wings
between plankton2 and stars. I find what I need
in far sources. I make them intimate,
I make them mine with the speed of light.
He was seventeen, just a man, still a boy and ready to die.
A true sacrifice, a living encounter --
This father has paid
the sum of a daughter's dowry for his son to be consecrated
with a rod through his cheeks and tongue. The boy's face,
his mouth pierced and gaping3, hangs on the page, helpless.
His clove-jelly eyes float and metamorphose into my mother's
eyes, eyes I can't possibly remember without images like his --
images forbidden, seized and smuggled4 into my life.
I can make anything mean what I need to find.
The stolen scrap5, the plosive glance saturated6 in
longing is not looking at me: I am looking at it.
Every description is thick with a will to revivify --
reclaim, renounce7, rename what is sought.
Blind hunger drives when I read. A scream, the echo of
a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village ... and bit
by bit a village I've never seen swells8 into me. The ovoid
mouth of my mother's life, its slivering9 silence exists
in that scream -- unheard, in memory. She came alive
forever -- not loud, just alive forever redeemed10 from her never
with no speech. A noun transformed to modify
action revived her, returned her to me.
The words as they lay may refuse to say what you need.
Drop to your knees. Crawl beneath the overhanging,
the dangling11 down. Stroke the described,
from underneath12. It reeks13 of the atavistic
to live. It survives by swallowing.