Noli Me Tangere

1.

No perfect metonym, no pure distillation.

Every wall I raise

is broached before I set my soldiers at the arrow-slits.

I missed that high school lesson:

letters cared into the bark of an oak, immense,

untraceable.

A child travels further

and further from self, wild terrain rising in altitude,

inland brush fading from basin to basin.

The child is immaculate.

She will never grow old, she presses the blank face of a dream

to her tired eyes and thin lips. She is the absence

and repository of all signifiers.

2.

Ecce faber, then.

To invest the soul in imagination,

in the prescribed economy. This patch of earth.

[Consider:

Pity is no more than distance wrapped in sentiment,

collusion with the expanding universe.

or

Pity is but distance wrapped in sentiment,

collusion with the universe, ever expanding,

signalling uselessly back to us.

or

I reject pity, its compound

of distance with sentiment.

--The argument thusfar ]

affixing some stray resonance.

3.

She is the absence and repository

of all signifiers. She is hungry. She walks

or is carried

a long way, through sandy hills.

–Do you want to believe this?

(And what does it mean, then, being a child?)

4.

Do you want to believe she wanted to return.

Do you want to be certain, do you want

to propel that single photon along it’s journey

to the mirror.

presuming, for the moment, the existence of a lid

we call time. Presuming, for the moment, its suspension:

the bracken,

the flat rocks of the falls,

salt tang giving way to bearblossom.

And will when matter,

so that I can call it rape for you; is that

what you’re thinking. Your finger

loose on the trigger.

Do you want her to survive.

Or, do you want to be the mirror. Or,

(5.)

do you want to be that certain.

6.

The brush of green blades against her footsoles.

7.

Do you want this to be about race.

–When I open my heart

there’s an infinite paper cut-out

strung accordion-like, hand in hand, every figure

its own simulacra.

–When I open my heart

I think the tree gap in the south line

holds the last coal of available perfection.

I could reach with my left hand, cover that space

where the light gives all

appearance of failing. Babies know this, like poets

reaching for the moon’s flat disc.

–When I open my heart

two moths flutter from the wound, wet and pulsing.

One light, one dark.

Or, do you want this to be about sacrifice.

8.

The fact of the body, ineludible.

[Meaning: the wheel is false

(the burning spokes) (the revolution)

Or, the hair on which I travelled to this place, that slender

ear of wheat, ripe in its dull cairn.]

9.

The rain came later that night.

I was feeling my way past a yew hedge.

I was feeling my way past a wall of smooth stone.

And then a sudden lowering, as a bird

declines in altitude through a series of calibrated

displacements

toward its goal. Coda of uplift.

At first there was a flatness, and I wanted to join it,

to extend my body through the three point that define a simple plane.

Her figure in powder blue (1937).

The foliate pyrography. A continuous weave–

(call this purity–)

Each ray

her triumph, my long home.

GC Waldrep