This Is No Time for Poetry,
2 Minutes Read Time
after Untitled (Hang iambics), Cy Twombly, 1994
so why not ask that halo
of dark whisper for anything, everything:
why not write the litany of wax and ash
on the first page of the book of
All My Shortcomings?
Haven’t I lived long enough
in the bone hollow, long enough in bonebreak and brakelight?
When do I not hear the high hum of desire
along the ringing rails of the heart’s train?
O Absent One,
hasn’t the stillness of your voice broken my blood’s black bells,
hasn’t its knife sliced the candlewick of my tongue?
What haven’t I asked for? What haven’t I stolen?
Give me sun spoor and moon melt,
give me grief's profusion
give me heaven’s crevice call—
let me gaze into what I shall not see,
let the questions,
small as seeds,
drop into the dark garden of the mind.
To silence your voice is to hear your voice:
I am listening:
Is the word want, is the word breath, is the word no?
Where are you, earliest annihilator?
First fist, first first, first bruise—
I feel your shunt:
Mouth, who will you cry out to? Heart, who will hang your noose?
I am trying to stretch out into the nothingness that is this life,
trying to untie the rope and drift,
unmoored, into what I have lost:
to listen to the song the Angels of Infinite Distance
might be singing:
But where is the shape to hold my hearing?
I wait, will wait. I try, am trying
to listen.
Read more from Issue 20.1.
