She will not let her calf sink to the sea floor. She will not take her to sea-shelf edge and drop off. After the edge of the sea is ether? Escapes from the center of an atom.
The poem too buoys her calf, the phrase, its terrible digit——the hanging semicolon, the word, article, the sentence, glyph, the letter g. Perhaps it is with no less mourning The Talehquah, nosing her dead calf to the surface for 17 days, passes from being a mother in issue’s company, void magicked away, to a vacancy perpetuated by issue failing to swim. What happens to the womb of a calf that makes it and one could not? Psychically what. She noses her calf to the surface, freighted with what could not survive / what did survive in her. Her sea with its corners was able. The world, not.
Beneath the surface of substrates where the poem is written the orca, autochthonous orca, pushing the glyph-field up through the sea-field. Who could think of writing the same way again. Like her calf, multiplied in its tragedy one-million-fold——think of every glyph——at one-million-fold, is her grief so attenuated it’s the final chord of chalk on black, interminable squeak and impossibly lengthened?——the autochthonous orca——she is more than everything——literal tout le monde——I think of her and love her with my deepest love, she makes my love capacious, finally——this is how the poem happens——être la maison, les rêves dehors. Of dreamlessness: something eternal rising to the call of our temporal, something beneath it Eternal——so kill the poetaster. He calls the orca from her moment’s sleep for labor he has not earned.
Past ascetic poses she is dreamlessness. Icy, l’étendue immobilee, Else, the dry cat at Buddha’s death and the snake. Slow descending figure ascending despite sea’s weight and with a now-empty sea within, meeting at the surface the most pained version of herself in verso, ‘she saw her own mortal pain coming to meet her’ says Blanchot, a flattened, inconsolable song: a terrible digit: listen:
If I think about poems this way I slough, I melt and slouch, the pen takes on a relic’s dreamlessness and menace, I consider what I mean to summon.
SHARKPACK Poetry Review 