Ode on a Line by Marie Howe

^{~ If I got on my knees, might I lift my life as a turtle carries her home?}

 

And what would I see there 
beneath the mud
of flooded deserts, of dirty
runes and pages pressed with dust
to passing hours? So long I looked
for severed diadems, meaning
I really was obsessed—
a child hunting the hills
haunting my house, rocks with lapidary 
yolks found secreted, lithic
eggs I was told when cleaved
revealed a violent shimmering.

I wanted it more than gold, more
than lapis, quartz or the Tongvan 
honed obsidian, pitch
arrows if you’re lucky
to recover anything intact—the boys 
enthralled with weaponry and tools. 
As I was, a fortshaper, a brush brute 
clearing the past in service of rooms 
for burnt imaginings, bushels
of them, my floors wept clean—no 
leaves or poison left—just talking mats 
of welcoming spiders, yucca, sage.

Step on it I said, imagining palaces, 
their crystal hiddenness, a granite 
heart I can split and lift
above like Atlas. I’m on my knees 
dissolving what remains now— 
stones to glitter, to semiprecious 
pools, soft and luminous
as water, as the moons of my 
children’s faces, humorous
as when I squeezed
their slippery eggs into the earth 
under this shell and its crumbling 
cosmos, under worlds where I write this, 
where I will bury myself, singing.