Elegies for Sister Satan: Eleventh Elegy
I was blind then, then a thread, then an effigy sledding toward the sun.
Then a child falling unnoticed through space and into the sea, a painting of the sea.
The sea an abecedarian.
It did not save me.
Dear Sister, your sisterhood didn’t save me, didn’t ease me.
Sister, may I still whisper us out into the evening for a walk, a walk by the sea, even if we are centuries– or light-years– apart?
As we walked near the Tiber that time, laughing like fools at the ruins, clasping screen memories to our breasts, and swallowing heavy metals from the Book of Songs.
Cobalt songs, chromium songs, cadmium songs, antimony, mercury, zinc, and always just then, some listener would inevitably complain, You have gone too far, sailed too far.
And where, pray, the elegy, where the Hanged Man, the Knight of Wands, the Sun, where the downbeat and, once again, the elegy?
And where, Sister, the aged pair bent ear to ear, and where now the poem, so-called, the noetic poem, the poem of unknowing, meant to be placed here, stumbling along this path “near the Tiber,” and where the words of summoning?
The sea an abecedarian, a palace of memory, declares the poem, so-called, while dealing out cards.
Hierophant, Knave of Hearts, Higgs boson, ancient cards dealing themselves.
Sister, pardon this interlude– it came about by chance.
Today, as ever more each day, the innumerable bodies adrift in the sea– who will count them, who claim them, these particles?
Sister, you once said, It is what it is; once said, You must change your life; once said, Words don’t mean anything; once said, You must wait.
And I waited in the alphabet’s shadow, waited, in the half-light, for eyes to turn from grey to green, for the words to reveal their names, waited for the cicadas and the night-birds to speak.
In this world, with its two suns and two moons, perhaps desire and grief are the same.
Who will count, who will claim?
From: Bomb #138, 2017
