from Anatomies of Ascent
Today I worked many hours on the proposition that “Love must be a lover of wisdom and, as such, is in between being wise and being ignorant.” I try to place this in a continuum in which you are either love or wisdom, and I am the girl on the long dock waving good-bye to sailors. I am bad at the idea but good at the elbow, the wrist, the way the lower lip of a smile slackens to show sadness or regret. The sea can have you because the sea has no desire for you. The sea can have you because there is no difference.
There are some languages you speak as mystery to. This is that language. There are others. In this mystery, someone carves the sea into rain. In this mystery, your voice in a cloud-mouth holds water to my ear, which is the ear of a small phonograph at the sea’s edge, turned by an occasional hand, and as such speaks back. Today the tide rises. To speak a mystery would seem an un-mysterious thing, so scrutable your language. Here is mine, awash.
I am convinced by the metaphysics of caves. You will make a demand on me that I cannot answer, and we will trade rough sketches of deer and the divine and our tools will be sticks and we will give our pictographs dimension with the rough brush of our tongues. If we part, it is because I have neither been brave, nor clear the way communication in caves might demand. I want to give everything to you (balloons, umbrellas, words, words), but I am confused by the physiology of arms; to use them as levers. To do with them the work of gifting, the arms themselves must become part of the economy they service. Take these coins from out my eyes: love, love, invisible love.
I speak of this time as recent past, but it is the shed skin of never and always, arbitrary point along a line which we think to contain all lines; the straight container of endless crookedness. Like I extend my hand to you (sinew, vein, bone hooked to bone) some morning when the mechanisms of distance have been exhausted. In some stories I wear a household glove, as do you, but the remove is not so much motion as the material we make it with. Like time. So it seems. How often we come around.
By feet you make a road. The way of pilgrims. The tide and the fish that are here, having been fished. Having loved the tide and fashioned the hook. Having been softly hooked and alive. By feet you make a road. Pilgrims before pilgrims. The tide before water to swell and abate. Under your feet, sands of deserts. Thousands and thousands. By feet you make a road. Little light on a continent. Make a way. To love and make a way. Light over lights you love. By a lantern. Under your hills and your houses are deserts. Sand in the history. Burning feet to the light you make roads upon roads. To here. To rest. To ever and ever footfall.
Photo by Katie Lobel.
Christina Mengert is the author of As We Are Sung (Burning Deck, 2011) and co-editor of 12×12: Conversations in 21st Century Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa Press, 2009). She currently teaches literature and writing for Bard College’s Prison Initiative Program.