Echo of Origin
wedded sepal
lupine pearl strung
with toothhole petaled tendons
or
pelvis split
in ardor’s labor swirling blacksmoke
coins in the sea
the eyes hawkmoth
a bible palmed across granite telling
gin river parable the muddy
waters rising over
rotted apples liver carved
by eponymous
wind
Copyright © 2022 by John James. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 7, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Echo of Origin’ responds to Roland Barthes’s claim, in Mythologies, that ‘In wrestling,’— intellectual grappling—‘the gesture severs every parasitical meaning’ and produces ‘a pure and full signification.’ ‘Such emphasis,’ he claims, ‘is nothing but the popular and ancestral image of the perfect intelligibility of reality.’ I wanted to imagine a language that recalls that ‘perfect intelligibility’ by severing once-arbitrary signifiers from the system of signs that burdens them with meaning. Because we live in such a system, however, there is no pure signification. Instead, the poem forges a stream of disparate signifiers, firing at each other in loose association.”
—John James
John James
John James is the author of Winter, Glossolalia (Black Spring Press Group, 2022) and The Milk Hours (Milkweed Editions, 2019). The recipient of fellowships and prizes from the University of California, Berkeley, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and the Academy of American Poets, he lives in Berkeley.