Unknowable
A brand new poem. For what it's worth.
Unknowable
Here's me with my basalt ruin, my
lost tundra neediness, cast amid
muttered notes fragmenting with love,
urgent with greed, fleeting
with want, curled fetal beneath
one solid theatre tower.
Where are you? Where?
Stopped off at the Sylvia? The Bellwether?
(Ladybugs, ivy, Errol, and heraldry?)
I went and bought a small guitar,
a tiny Ibanez,
to shore myself against the
grief tsunamis to come,
while you, drunk only on the now,
scoured concupiscent inventories
for dildos, perfect condiments for soup,
rodents, antlers, dripping cormorants.
Dark winglike music, malbec, sushi, tarot, love.
Me prone and spent amid
the prunelike slime
of sopping leaves pressed like
massed eons of sediment.
Got home, tuned it, strummed a lament,
got the Led out, caterwauled,
hummed an Appalachian dirge, a rant,
a moonshiner sonata and a desert screed,
squalled some secret boy and girl tune,
fireflies, calls, maple leaves, blues,
ancora qui,
ancora tu.
It's work to watch hands build and furl
then come undone and go unfurl,
while roof hymns spatter bitumen eaves
and Jersey shores recede, zeal stutters,
and all of it, everything,
bleeds.
My idling car is northern Canada,
immune and snowbanked, yearning south.
Get in and twist the dial
so radio broadcasts
hiss awhile, gaping
unbreakable as bridge cable,
conjuring rainforests,
stupefied like forecasts of something
unnamable, lowing scattered as prairie cattle, yet so
utterly, alarmingly unknowable.
***