The Abyss
I remember the precipice of
your opening mouth, the weight pulling us
down through an echo of fathoms
where sleep would search for us,
phantoms tumbled and rolled together
like half-formed dough,
many elements made one pliant thing,
sticky and salt, hair damp,
skin hot, limbs uncoiled and slack
abstracted hands caressing the aftershock
cupping, carrying all that heat
off the edge into wavering dark.
There was no landing from that
once we had jumped, just
a foreverfall full of vague sorts of
banging collisions, mangling and dividing;
yet a song that is half-scream can't be
unsung. The tache noire: cessation,
desiccation; could not blot away the glow
from those brown eyes
nor the fire alive in my skull.
A blue flame blinks there still
to pilot the last breath,
however cold the empty air of separation.
May 2023
5 comments:
I could feel this leap and plunge as I read. "A song that is a scream cant be unsung" - what an amazing line. This poem engages the senses of the reader and takes us over the precipice with the narrator. Writing doesnt get any better than that.
"yet a song that is half-scream can't be
unsung." - a very powerful notion. I like the image you included with the writing as well, it makes me think more of the motifs of living and dead, in the sense of emotions.
Nothing small about this petit mal du noire, if such a thing could coin the little death that brings lovers together here. The harrowing oubliette has cataclysmic delight at its surface, "abstracted hands caressing the aftershock /
cupping, carrying all that heat / off the edge into wavering dark." But what follows is "a foreverfall full of / vague sorts of
banging collisions, mangling and dividing." Why do we do it? Well, because "a song that is half-scream can't be
unsung" even after the tache noire. That little blue pilot life has such a long afterlife. Wild, thrilling, terrifying stuff, friend, whispered in the tsunami wake of Yes.
How deftly brought into being this song of that deep coiling and the slow never to fade ending that marks us for all time held in that small blue light. "a foreverfall full of vague sorts of banging collisions, mangling and dividing;" made me smile a remembering smile and that half -scream image made me shiver. A powerful piece of writing wrapped in a silky touch.
Aptly titled, and vividly and deftly described as only you can.
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