Measurement Fable
like water in water —George Bataille
Eggs, transparent and sometimes red-veined as insect wings, might be hidden in bark crevices or a scatter of tawny leaves. The distance between one gestation and the next, a pleat of the dress I wear carelessly, as if I could sew myself another. Practiced, my tendon-reflex where the tunnel narrows its halo into a noose. I trust dexterity as a kind of nourishment, as I believe my own mother couldn’t. To own, beauty is the first lie of it, and brief as incident is gray thistles turning silver in sunrise as if for my eyes alone. I see you surround me, mother, measuring what my exoskeleton withstands. Embellishment is thin. When the eye inside blinks, its bone-house splinters. No eye inside sky but an insect drone can cause the entire horizon, seasonal as hindsight which follows rain. No death will stop measurement spiraling out, a long ribbon of salt I must choose repeatedly to cross.
Copyright © 2014 by Rusty Morrison. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on January 7, 2014. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"Michel Serres tells us that 'every form is draped in an infinity of adherences'; this has haunted my writing for some time. I’ve begun a series of poems in which I want to un-'drape' subjects that I have written about in the past, and release them from the upper layers of 'adherences' of meaning that I have previously explored. Beneath my understanding of these subjects, I am finding a sense of fable, and it is at that level I’ve begun to work. The writings of Bataille have been an excellent provocation for me in this work, as I seek a deeper, more disquieting relationship to the known, to what I perceive as the knowable and the unknowable."
—Rusty Morrison
Rusty Morrison
