O god of the desublime, allay the vertical penitentes their limbs, rest them back cold, not in precipitate but in seed, in potential of hydrogen. Spoon in density
to be sung of their winter’s seed and soak. Sip pond to suncups, over sunrise. Far from the flat dispatch of heat, its stench, its wayward ever summer barge
and fallout. Jesus be a river. Be a untainted float of deliquescent surge. Be saltless and cold. O pose of hope, allay the waterfall, hear their prayer,
O bed of oxygen, divine surge. Be also brackish sea. Be seed of the frost, and supercooled. Be shade soup. Sweet hale of beloved drench and mitochondrial belly,
be flint for the watery flame. Douse out the eventual crunch, the big scorch, the rip of our primordial anus and mouth, suckling at the place of eco abundance. O sweet bio teat,
O hygroscopic lordess. Were we to sit still and let ourselves be cold for hours, wiped of web crack frost, mild sud of the slow glacier, rimed vat at the edge of rash season, our legs from twitching.
O known keep of tomorrow, might we skill our motor by, pedal from the crib of our await. O stable evolver, an alms for safe passage, your earthen cooling, forgive us our erosion. Heal the demanding snows.
Aingeal Clare reviews new collections from Michael Longley (The Candlelight Master), Claudia Rankine (Just Us: An American Conversation), David Morley (Fury), and Pascale Petit (Tiger Girl). "Petit," she writes, "is a passionate laureate of the natural world, but alive to the cruelty of human depredation, as when she encounters a man sewing an owl’s eyes shut."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"My home mountain range, the Colorado Sangre de Cristo, is an 80-mile fault-block uplift, with ten summits over 14,000 feet....Walking there for the last forty years has helped me learn that place is neither fixed nor purely spatial, but temporary and temporal, contingent and unstable, an intersection of forces I happen to encounter (and take part in) during my brief time on earth and briefer time as walker through a landscape. Here & now is a knot, and all its strands are moving."
