by Andrew Merecicky
Take the moment of a cool wet hanging
At night—a form until a body breach.
A brief chance to forget the soul banging
Apart in a low rapid canyon reach,
In other’s ears, vaporous, sanguine,
Shifting, warm as a word comes stiff
Approximated through desert heat, cliffs,
Shaken red, repeatedly bend their shapes
Then empty beneath the dim misted drape.
Hear blue breath on a frosted window;
Nothing gained, not window, not living trace
And nothing is necessarily So.
The inward eye, drugged, always haranguing,
At last exhausts itself when nothing preached
Affirms the life nightly lost to waiting
Fears. What more might a verse have to teach
If more the body wrote instead the praying
Soul. The Pacific gorging drum teacup skiff
Ringing underwater bell found adrift
Off foreign coast—a cosmos of escape,
Secret sufferings red-yoked busting nape
Of the neck, line of nature’s double blow:
Stole of plentied minds, verses never sate,
Still, nothing necessarily is So.
Still harbored God, like a dark bruise fading,
Prayer-hands pleading to plow heaven’s white beach,
While Logos’ staring Form— offshore wading
Is a green-eyed sexual skink sour peach,
The kind of fear forgot to dreams abating—
Prophet mouths lie, buried in the holy kerchief—
Rot eats the liquid-bark, the Will to Sniff!
Madness lulled by incense and hammered grape,
Rewrite the well-inspected Myth and ape
What the Mask, un-bodied, obliquely shows,
(We only know to write by rote, by rape)
Nothing here is necessarily So.
The theatre called The Schizoid Playing:
Leans upon unmoral perch, mistook speech,
The Art of Hurried Insurrection Naming,
Actors and tittering whores come to leech
The sick, and irritate the creatures’ banking.
Join the palsied dance in winter’s drifts,
Between which each can make their pulsing shrift
Drowned by the inane, dark pontiffs’ prate:
Evil’s known here in the black hoof sulcate,
Not in the lyric tongue by which we know
That such and such is the Present State—
No! Nothing necessarily is So.
Through the flames, now give your idle clanging—
What? Silent? Someone else’s Word beats
Upon your back? Dumb before the preying
One, Another, Whimpering God Effete.
Enough with worship of nightly baying
Ποίημα, that well-wrought transcendent rift
Transformed into deluge permission if
[The boat leaks in the darkest part of the water,]
Drink the rest— bed down in the waterscape
Collected to your breast, mother to the waterscape,
Conflate all borrowed into some marred credo
Prodigy of air and metal. Sleep—forget
Nothing is necessarily So.
Rise to the noon, when the sun is a fluid hoop,
The mouth of two gold buckets of roots,
An authority that comes in surging—thresholds
We mouse underneath, yet another
origin, another—
Nothing is necessarily So,
Never necessarily So.
Nothing at all is needed so.