Jorie Graham / Ashes

 

Ashes

by Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham / Cenizas

Manacled to a whelm. Asked the plants to give me my small identity. No, the planets.
The arcing runners, their orbit entrails waving, and a worm on a leaf, mold, bells, a
bower—everything transitioning—unfolding—emptying into a bit more life cell by
cell in wind like this
sound of scribbling on
paper. I think
I am falling. I remember the earth. Loam sits
quietly, beneath me, waiting to make of us what it can, also smoke, waiting to
become a new place of origin, the other one phantasmal, trammeled with entry,
ever more entry—I spent a lifetime entering—the question of place hanging over me
year after year—me thinning but almost still here in spirit, far in, far back, behind,
privy to insect, bird, fish—are there nothing but victims—
that I could become glass—that after that we would become glacial
melt—moraine revealing wheatgrass, knotgrass, a prehistoric frozen mother’s
caress—or a finger
about to touch
a quiet skin, to run along its dust, a fingernail worrying the edge of
air, trawling its antic perpetually imagined
end—leaping—landing at touch. A hand. On whom. A groove traversed where a god
dies. And silken before bruised. A universe can die. That we could ever have, or be
one body. Then picked up by the long hair
and dragged down through shaft into
being. One. Now listen for the pines, the bloom, its glittering, the wild hacking of
sea, bend in each stream, eddy of bend—listen—hear all skins raveling,
unending—hear one skin clamp down upon what now is no longer
missing.
Here you are says a voice in the light, the trapped light. Be happy.

Jorie Graham, Fast, 2017