☀ Today's Poem: Excerpt from "forget thee" Ian Dreiblatt

I am sitting by a river
with Enheduanna the
first poet known to
history by name from
the 2200s bce

she wants to know what
people say in unison now,
oh, I tell her, we have more
parallax than unison, since the
big empty fractaled off into
infinite micronothings, she
nods, that's why we started
writing things down, and
by the way it was wonderful
like waking in a fresh
body each morning

and what do you sing into?
she asks, I say, history I
guess or the ability to sign a
timeline what about you? and
she says, a dream of a woman
young and full of power
her great awesomeness
covers the great mountain
and levels the roads

she raises floods clothes
herself in whirlwinds
speaks a hot language
that melts amethyst
out of the earth

what do you do all day,
she asks me and I say, oh
mostly reconfigure small
columns of light into finely-
tuned looping patterns and
then worry about various
aspects of the loops, what
about you?

it varied, sometimes
washing stone feet
sometimes chanting until
you felt like a
marionette one day I
had the thought could
writing be a medium for
poetry but then again
who can live in a body
someone else made them
and how long might
any language keep et cetera

except then I tried it & it
worked I wrote poems
down and could feel
them scratching across
the translucent
surface I became of
a smooth red tablet

oh, I say, well we took
things a little far maybe
we threaded the world
with infinitesimal writing
the air our bodies the
shores of the continents

she says, all any world
ever was is whatever you
miss from it, the streets'
shifting intimacies, smells
of friends' houses, outcroppings
of rock, ghost and commodity

so write it all down,
she says, write it in stone
in the loose morning
of nothing we hoped for
ten thirty sits like a
diamond and you'll
never believe this but
that's all there ever
was anyway