I think I have finished this poem. Or its finished with me, one way or the other. CONCORD Blondish head crowned with sunlight and cloudless azure, the universe has aged only four years, still immaculate, wild: the boy runs, he runs, bare feet quickening over cool grass, and knows not why or where, but he runs in the elation of not knowing, towards the towering tree on the horizon, a lone elm, its summer leaves announcing the advent of the illimitable world. The child’s hand touches the plenum of sprouting shape and colour. He does not yet entirely belong to words and the grammatical fiction: stumblingly spoken, ‘tree’ doesn’t fit into this tree, like blocky puzzle pieces don’t quite squeeze into place. How to bridge the inarticulate gap between ‘I’ and ‘laughing’? Laughing is who I am, right now, he says to himself, laughing. cinaminaminamon he intones, mantralike, savouring the sensation of pure syllable on the tongue. He names, reluctantly, the stuffed animals herded onto his bed. In crayon, he draws two arches equalling exactly the blackbirds that darken the clouds outside his window. Crude abstractions thickly scrawled cannot speak for the boy: it is this foreign language, not he, that is clumsy. —And he runs. Halfway to the elm tree, he glances back at his tiny home and his mother sitting on the patio. The boy abandons himself to the kaleidoscopic whole. The California sun at its zenith, shadows vanish: here is the unbroken hour. Now, says a voice in his head— and he lets go his legs: right now falling is who I am. Flinging his scrawny body to gravity, the planet spins, lost in the blue immensity. The soil smells of peppercorn. Out of breath, nestled in grass, seamless with the tangible sky, lies he, dazed on an earth innocent even of love, an earth bearing a curious child and a handful of tenuous names. Mere filament of memory, a discontinuous ghost. Hurled out into the years and the tumult of counted minutes, he sleeps on the periphery, a tenebrous dream. Will he reawaken one final hour, dying unto the deathless sum, stunned by the unutterable? Will the seamless world welcome again this prodigal son with aphasiac epiphany, to be resolved at last into the immeasurable know-nothing into which he first fell?
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 01:49:09 +0000
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