JULIA GUEZ
I Guess It’s Too Late to Live on the Farm
27 February 2015
A landscape adequate to loss. Greenery where before there was amnion, pearl, pollen and salt.
[A foaling not unlike any other.] Not that there hasn’t also been wonder.
And the effect of many suns setting at once.
A pall which many of us begin by pretending not to notice.
After the quickening through tissue and bone, bloodied, bulge lowering into the last hold
[When self-preservation has become secondary]
Eyes close tight like a fistful of silver, the solsticed sky black and then phosphine-flecked.
The first of many deaths, a martyring.
Anything to bring cantering back from what river crossing cold
First a mare-like plodding sound, then something more hopeful.
While the terrain we travel lanternlessly, and, yes, afraid isn’t cohering much longer.
Beyond any semblance of a treeline beleaguered by the same thought:
How the swale and copse began to bend birdlessly abandoning the fallows’
Odd interval until juniper and pine disappear completely
And sheer, the land mostly tectonic now has risen
To the level of my hands, forcing a final genuflection of sorts.
Ambivalences (and there were some
Whose only safe passage had to have been a violent one),
A subset of the heretofore, unmoored,
Like so many forgotten trades now littering the inlet with hulls.
[Seachange]
The saddest wicker paint peeling nets phlegm motor line spool pier sound of that last anchor
Chain borne aloft hand over hand dangling,
The ferryman aware of what this might mean.