Conjured
You used to live beside the river
Where grasses palmed the down of waterfowl
Into scraps of your many incarnations.
Tilt your head and they could be glyphs
For songs or psalms or cries or incantations
Coalescing into goose-winged summonings
Of me as flat-footed and near-fingerless,
Cupping a plume with bird-awkward hands.
How can you expect me to lift such things,
Like pulling my soul from the ground again?
Its shadows have not been invented, yet,
But its eulogies have, leached of your skin
When you covered the sun with a feather
And smiled like a song stolen from a dream.
I hear them with my eyes in another world,
Where circlets of ladybirds open up,
Blossom into planets or lakes or leaves,
Murmuring dormant trees into greenery -
And I am destroyed by this great spell
Of undoing, rooted in my own Earth,
Elsewhere, where an insect is just an insect.
You are conjured, my quieting hymn,
Oil-scried of moments that were more than moments.
I have no words. I can but ask you to reach
Into this poem, wraith-like, and gently
Cup its magma like an unborn child.
Pour yourself into its formless ear
Through the parentheses of your fingers
Until you clasp the ore of its organs,
Pressed into iridescent eyes of prophets.
We could cover the sun with these trinkets, too.
We could cover all things in metal-green,
Indistinct, where it’s hard to make out your face
But the chrome pulls the sky into the earth
And we walk on clouds in shoes of verdant moonlight
And I hold your hand as if you never left.
