& I found it at the bottom of an american river—& in
the leaves which gathered at its surface’s semblance
of stillness, appearing & not so, as if endless
though counted for, & I found it not in the beams
of light, but how, electric & frantic, they danced beneath
the water, like a choreography preceding any notion of
body, or unknowable twins returning to the half-self
they could have never imagined & I found it in that half
-liminal light, divined into fractal’s endless—before split
& risen, before splay & tempt, before
womblessness became an american sadness & I found it
in my mother’s breath, her reek of rivers still
enough to pass as reflection & in the smogged
aftermath of filter & filter &, I found it—there,
yes, there: in the wilderness rotting
at the center of me—crater of me, tender cesspool
unaccounted for, unnameable aside from the complacency
of latex & in the tempt of men I will
not fable, not legend, or border between. Because I cannot
taint this dark with all the names
they could not give me, the only crown I reach for
is felled kingdom—this is how I fawn
the toxic, flora. But is this not the first
motion, of arriving at a pastoral: to have
a past to run from? Though the Anthropocene of me
is memoryless as a pathing wind, as prayer’s
barter. Gethsemane of me, I beg of you a fruit
half-bitten & worm writhed—first language, bitter
prosody of me. This is the only fall my body
can muster: eclipse of. Lone, knowable
nightfall. I cannot return to a weightless less american
than this, the pulled into: body
of me. Poisoning eucharist
of. Take me into the canon’s night & may it be a good,
good night—& may that night be anything, anything but
a mouth—anything but a body of—
Copyright © 2021 by George Abraham. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 1, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.