Amanda Jernigan

My little lack-of-light, my swaddled soul, December baby. Hush, for it is dark, and will grow darker still. We must embark directly. Bring an orange as the toll for Charon: he will be our gondolier. Upon the shore, the season pans for light, and solstice fish, their eyes gone milky white, come bearing riches for the dying year: solstitial kingdom. It is yours, the mime of branches and the drift of snow. With shaking hands, Persephone, the winter’s wife, will tender you a gift. Born in a time of darkness, you will learn the trick of making. You shall make your consolation all your life.

Sei allem Abschied voran: half a line from Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus as my motto, I rehearsed my elegiac art (“be in advance of all parting”) and won, I thought, with each song deeper, until I stood before the keeper in whom I’ve come to recognize myself.

They billow from a hillside in Cha’am. Together, they are more than plural: the planet’s darkest song, a tongue, a serpent muscling air apart, a dire banner come unfurled, a river flowing wholly from the old, mute mountain’s desperate heart, the last confession of the world. Conceive of each one singly, if you can.

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread: you put this rather beautifully, and gave me leave to sing my work until my work became the song. In sorrow shalt thou eat of it: a line on which a man might ring the changes as he tills the ground from which he was taken. Thistle, thorn (in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed), these too shall it bring forth to thee, all the days of thy life till the end, the synagogue of the ear of corn. Poem and plowman cleave the dark. One can't eat art. But dust is art, and unto dust shall I return. O let my song become my work.