1.
She’s in no shape to wrestle heavily,
is her first excuse,
avoiding bone-to-bone ferocity.
Given dislocations,
subtle breaks,
mended bits, for even if
an angelic challenger presented,
and why to her?
it would be a practical risk.
Why bother?
To be more broken than now?
Why try it?
She couldn’t stand it.
2.
The surprise?
Something did happen,
was exchanging
agitations,
shook-scintillation folds,
when air and ground, plump with invisibles,
confronted her with
voicings, tones,
whose velocities pulsed her.
Yet any “what?”
evaporated.
Left deniability.
3.
Some black-white Yes-No
ribbons of hum, spiraling,
unfurled
the widest wingspan—
further than yes, larger than no.
What was this? What had happened?
Linked whisps, inhering whispers.
she cannot name these
in the lexicon she knows.
So she remains
stubborn, resistant.
She will not discuss, will not declare,
and will not listen to dismissive
explanations.
4.
Some say she heard that resonance
and did sense odd
infoldings
from moody joyous beings,
a strain of mattering,
rooted, moving. Some say:
impossible. Some say it was only one,
never surging layers, never plethora.
She herself appears distrustful, suspicious
for who else hears these
other verbs, odd reverbs?
Who will believe her?
She can only mutter against the fixed
singleness of Word
and conceal her listening
amid the sounds and sibilants
of these labile scintillants.
She sensed unspoken intricacies,
matter made in growing sound,
rooted in unknown, unspoken networks.
Why and how had she become infused
with tones and hums, with rhythms
that she insists she hears, hears often.
Believable? Troubled?
5.
Jacob was to have limped,
disjointed, pulled, well-marked,
hurt, impaired. And satisfied.
He will have been touched by One.
Insistent, Enormous. A challenger.
She could not speak of her pluralities, her
conglomerate worlds, pulses heard,
her thinking alongside tonalities.
Injured?—she spits,
That J was for Jacob.
I came before this, tricky as he,
Yet I remain unheard, inured.
6.
The Rachel stands tuned
to multiplicities,
aslant in a territory of longing,
where she becomes foreign.
What has she found?
She listens, acknowledges another sound,
diffuse, multiple,
pulsing thought, oscillations, whisperings,
never only one.
7.
Inured, the Rachel wanders in a zone
keyed only to the single story
all others seem to agree to.
Who talks of more stories—who
knows what she has
listened to, the low, multiple reverbs,
that tolled
an uncountable trailing
of threads, roots, cells, trills,
of wings, of cellbursts
flashing consciousnesses, of
lambent junctures
telling
presences neither set in any text
nor closed tight in any ark.
8.
The Rachel: doubly, triply exilic,
saturate with twanging undertones,
with sounded textures.
She enters these tangles.
Ululations. It’s
the play of
vibrancy she hears,
in clashed throbs—
concord, resonance, difference,
the many metamorphosing angles.
June 2022–July 2023