Surely the body is made of stranger things than politics can steal: the tangled residue of stars, the plastic bag and orange peels I kick past the bridge, flaming nerves splayed across ancient and forgotten avenues, the stomach-heavy goodbye to others that always feels a limit on anyone’s remaining days I see now I really did believe that the stories of languages breaking open the embedded money source were the victory of changing grandeur over the paltry measured ties misnamed time— I could never believe that people meant the counting, the stacking, the definitions the dividing, that those could be more than misunderstanding even when burned in iron; The world is simply not anything any of us say of it our names are strange delusions pulling us back from a brink we are always falling through— it has no shape no words it is not a brink we are not anyone there is no falling
Copyright © 2017 Mark Wallace. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 28, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
What does it mean to be so still? to glide along the ocean floor like some black-tongued electric eel, to burn through marbled gold and green of oceanic things like some compact mass deforming space, time, a void within voids, and then? It is easier to imagine amphibian, to know that blood, too, can change its temperament as quickly as salamanders change skin, as quickly as eyes of newt and tongues of dog become incantations, enchantments of art and life just as an animal submerged under water becomes unknown, just as respirations become primitive and breaths and motions cease as a lone fish in a dark pond arrives as an object of thought and becomes stone.
Copyright © 2017 by Rita Banerjee. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 30, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.