Liberties

Once, there were neither bottled-up fields nor bluebottled breeze; nor trill of pollen, tree nor hill to die on was there there (there, there): not yet our unseated adjustment of dust; no striking star, nor stroke of sun; nor did the moon light, like the grey, scaled nodule nodding off the dead end of a cigarette;               nor was sea seen. No, nothing: neither loose nor bitter ends. Yet there was something sizing up that endlessness, some agency which advertised the heavens’ opening: our ice floes’ flow, our black and smeary snow above              the alps of steel production plants, our rivers’ scalp of fat;  and which said, “Before you were, I am.”   Like that last phrase, you run, like blinding colors through the eyeless world and when the mind forgets itself, you’re there — where what is left to know is left to live.  Fine, hold me in your Holocene: give me a kicking; and the goods,  the martyrs with their hopscotch blood and nails as fragrant in their palms as cloves — a coat of your arms to weather the flustering, clusterbomb wind, which changes, and the tide of time which draws us from ourself and — as it takes time to keep time; it takes              one to know one; it takes — and which draws itself out.