1.
Whichever way the body moves declares its
plurality as synthesis, a nocturnal light that draws
.
one back to beginnings. Stability of a body’s first
facts, belief formed from its few loose principles.
.
I waited for my spirit helper to see the days as
unclosed, reclaimed as ritual, as prophecy for one
.
host to keep our body intact. Unhoused
what can it do but repeat its movement inside the circle
.
that is part mythic instruct, part verbal assignation. I borrowed
my hands to find Attic soil, stole clothing from my dead
.
ancestors to become transmittance again, a slipped-off
border child, the road cut through Florida’s coast like an abeyant
.
twist of lemon light upon the beaches of Sanibel Island.
Not hardship but occupancy, a licorice-flavored sun
.
that holds the body stationary, rapt in its purpose. To travel inside
these days of outermost eclipsed realism. A boundary
.
between states that is at once the formation of perception
and its regulation. A crossing of Atlantic waters that maneuvers
.
memory against itself, as if to expurgate identity were the cost
of each new migration. Resting in these waters, the Gulf’s
.
paratactic synthesis of torso and hands, I re-admit my body
to its earthly position, a signal of yearning and disavowal, brokered
.
boundary of red channeled light that remains absent of the first
person. This ritual of naming and un-naming that allocates
.
each place as doubly foreign, half-remembered.
2.
There is coincidence and its absence, one can wrest
subjectivity from its lair, like the counter position of blue
.
harbor light, witnessed from above, so that water and sky are the first
to enter memory. A fellowship of birds I attend to again:
.
songs of hummingbird and robin, in each the falcon
never far from view. The solstice just past
.
or beginning again, as plaited moonlight reinscribes itself
on each portion of disturbed ground. The rhetorics of sensation
.
sharing their position among these temporal deposits. The place
where I spend my days is farther away from Florida yet
.
its geography repeats itself as abstraction and composite form of telling.
I walked into the sunlight, the day proceeding behind me, not
.
palliative but distributive, a line from here to there and back again, blind
casuistry of the first form, like the memory of glass inside a panel of light.
.
I move within this system of shapes, articulated flora that sharpens
the point of a compass needle perpetually directed south.
.
Not one line but a plurality of lines, so that to crease the eastern shore
is to revitalize the west. Paradise birds of summer moving across each line.
.
Creased paper floating in a pool of yellow light. As if the beginning
of a word had been spelled across sand. I keep the days here and move without
.
ability to distinguish one hour from the next. Salvage is an
act brought forward by language, refusal as much part of what is said
.
as the light that draws itself across my body at mid-morning.
3.
As light is never without shape. A curtain falling from the heavens
that deposits on us its coppery residue, its manila comb.
.
The language shifts by degrees, fulfilling its purpose of
bringing forward what can be said. And the next phase?
.
A surplus of Appalachian quartz. Our existence lived by
water, the seriality of song that resumes at daybreak, like channels
.
of green ice flowing over quartz granules, as though color had left the world
to return just above a vineyard’s tree line. There’s room to move
.
inside the sun’s box, a cautionary flight of herons, the spiritual
realism that guides us through, allaying death’s margin call
.
within the materiality of one’s body. Here in loose cathexis
of belief and revival, I extract Florida from what I know.
.
Geography as birth name, as first register of thought. A numbness
in the hands gives way to this movement of earth and air.
.
Here in a house set back from the water, I give myself over to
regional spiritualism. A synthesis of encoded and objective clarities.
.
Hesitancy and movement. Light slips into the beginnings
of each day so that what I saw the day before reverses itself like a mental image
.
reproduced on pages of onion skin. The waters of Florida loosen, revealing
what’s not here but always here, this combination of trace and sign
.
that resembles memory, the rumor of change. A habit of separation and
resettlement, as the body is bound by all that it couldn’t
.
invest its time in. The white moon descends, produces a third vision
in which we travel, unhoused, bluer for having returned to
.
the heavens, enfolded in light.
4.
All of it a form of labor, the materiality of song, as tides
produce an idiolect of the spirit. Native forms, the spiral that is constant
.
as any encirclement, an emplacement of the self on sweet braided
sea grass. The heaviest days are back of us, you can review them
.
along the Sarasota coast, the water that removes everything
separates and reunites, as grammar becomes once more
.
host to speech. The investment is mutual, a form of
call and response, as once there’d been a language for
.
surplus, degrees of salt and saw palmetto, the crisp tonic light that is
the Gulf coast’s terminal gift. To arrive is to re-make the sensory
.
daylight in one maneuver, hover underneath sun’s lucid disc, a locality
that bears witness to what is taken. Can one combine
.
green with blue, roseate spoonbill and purple gallinule, weightless in the
blue green sky? Like eyes that have given room to a tension
.
between here and there, each bird in limbo, charcoal imprints on quartz sand
so that this too is habitual, bled from a ribbon of green embedded
.
wax myrtle. No one birth is possible when none is locatable. How many
days inside the green room to return there, sun and shade, this universe
.
to which we have migrated, held by the hands of strangers, torsos of half
coral and distended rope. No one is there, you said, the way the Gulf waters
.
turn green in the late afternoon sun, almost as though cloth had covered the sun
in a shawl drawn over the body, then the incompleteness of one’s activity. To pivot
.
on hot sand, the feet and ankles moving to demotic meter, one is neither
a person nor the absence of person, but the vehicle through which the body travels.
.
A perimeter of blue blossoms. Florida’s swamp privet raised to the eye.
What is recalled, what can’t be expressed. A daily toll to what’s seen.
.
A night of hibiscus and ixora.
Black skimmer and crested caracara.
.
Memory weaves, unweaves the echoes….
5.
We are each, householder, each with a treasure….
.
The flint and the cross, keys of blood. Mnemosyne’s objective
case, to wake inside this room, still life, a portrait of one’s first
.
self. There is this respite, localized, a blend of sister and brother, twinned
forms of self. I am moving without objective case to return myself
.
to the diagram. Loop knife water. The skin’s replicate
soothing. The room that became my room though my ghost wasn’t there.
.
To call and respond, receive and return. Ruin-like. A run into
the waters of my boyhood near Chesapeake Bay.
.
I come into its circuits, sleepless, as gerrymandered light
recedes in the west. Eclipses of cloud shadow. To combine the random
.
at a moment’s notice. Here inside chaptered locality
adept to bird song and river light. A hummingbird I hadn’t
.
noticed returning to its nest. The floodwaters near Lahaska
receding. Winter is green and temperate now, the fields shifted
.
into their fallow season. Yesterday the movement was rectilinear, parallel
earth lines drawn across the sky. I etched a boundary in wet grass, another and
.
another to follow the first, line and circle, circle and line, each a signature
and a form of dialogue. One recedes into memory of Gulf waters
.
to hear the first morning birds in the trees, lifted, pluralized, one
to another in a system of demarcated repetition. Each
.
movement resolves itself as further conciliation, metastasized folds
of daily living. A heron crosses the sand in Sarasota, a flock of
.
turkey vultures circle above the Hudson. The embodiment of their flight
parallel to the journey we make below. Soft seventh year of rain…
.
Vertical spirits’ haven. The intricacy of valuation that is inseparable
from the body’s account of its labor. Stripped and simple solitude.
.
Dialects of sight and sound rising from inside morning wind, heron
and hummingbird that have become one creature, as my hands move into water
.
to enfold themselves in light. Pool and shadow. Land and the absence
of land. Winds shift, flood waters subside, each body
.
returned to its initial position, numinous and unhoused.
