And so I lay myself in the trench
with my spade and let
the dirt follow me, fill me.What am I
to be within the wild arrival—the field spare, my number
dark—I’m pulled back
into the fire, into the sour sun where you
named my thirst. Jupiter’s language,
a trap of rough-hewn roads, a voice
I recognized once
and then again once
in the space of blue dusk, whose paddock
drops back across the river, an acre—American-sized space—
my crinkled, tight-lipped sonnet might
not stray, I tell you
my blessing brother: that to open the sky, to taste
a far-off cloud is the real understanding, a desertion
part loss, part ‘what’s the difference,’ the body
is a prison you know?
And the body passes into a new time. A time
shifting and untethered where someone wants flowers, a wreath
at love’s command. I see myself
drawn between seascapes. I thought
there must be logic, a slip road, my loathsome shape
is an invention, my thoughts—as if to warn
there was only one danger or maybe seven, a voice
foretells the outsiders there is no water here, and I bless
the voice that guides me.
I bless you my dead brothers, those who taught me
to live like this alone. You dot the hills, articulate
desire: as who—whose trees are those? I never found
the house, but the hostages encountered palings
in a tight corner, bound
to the sycamore, burnt
to extinction.
Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of a novel, Today Yesterday After My Death and seven books of poetry: Arbor Vitae, Tender to Empress (Visual Poems); Pyre; Later, Knives & Trees; Mirror Inside Coffin; Mantic; Apparition Wren.