Dan Beachy-Quick

Mortal oddment, there’s no wish in the blood But beat, but stay gift-strong, but make demands To keep within veins this ore’s diffuse gold, These voices that know without being known — These voices that riddle thought with herself, Ridicule thought in her flimsy eternal Gowns a child can tear in half   with a breath — That chorus arterial, unbribable, Blowing song through self as a child blows A dandelion apart — All those weeds? — Thistle’s down and thistle’s thorn, dumb yellow Globes below that bind grass to their hollow creed, Wind’s meager flute, sere song, the whole field’s late Doom? Heart-blood? Voices, you? That’s my portrait? — I kept repeating, repeating, kept re — To repair, to repair my, or not my —the Mind’s bower, but whose — who mines urgency — Or whose mind regrets all those violets rooted In violence — or I only mean thought, in thought, Not violence, thinking, and the stupid leaf Unfolding, mine, mine, mind. Here’s the plot All untended: Psyche and, and — some thief Unnamed — no, some unnamed leaf, and the sun, Yes, only the sun that through open eyes Turns the livid leaf green. Not leaf. Meant wound — Or is it wind, is it wind that split in half   by A gnat, by a blade of grass, always heals its gale — What is the wound that is being healed, healed —

Scholar-on-waves, a water-gazer, Call me Ishmael. Re-enter my own life. Waves: they murmur, babble, waves Do not articulate what the ocean Turning in its bed thinks: What must be said. Sing above or sing Below The knot in the plank, the cursive Pine-grain Of my life in the bow and my life Bay-less in the bowels Of the bow I signed myself on as me to become more so myself— A study, one volume of 36 signatures, 576 pages (9 blank for notes), And became dispossessed of all but one mis- spoken leaf— Pro- and epilogue both.Sign your mark. I do Find the escape Clause titled in fine print, watermarked, on condition Of being or becoming: me Tar-dark, thumbless or thumbed, Ocean eats the nib of pen But a nub dipped in pitch Sing above or sing below The wave’s back Broken by another wave There is no air besides A nub dipped in pitch Can’t help But write, beneath the sea-hawk’s wing The sea-hawk’s cry,Sign your mark With a nail, a splinter, a harpoon In the hand can’t help But Sing above and sing below But write but What song strides surface tension Help but write Thirst chokes and salt slakes A contract for a name Of being or becoming Ink on the line, a name or a contract For a name, a thumbprint, or I Signed me on on my name alone: Now Profit Now Leak Now Bury Now Speak.

The senseless leaf   in the fevered hand Grows hot, near blood-heat, but never grows Green. Weeks ago the dove’s last cooing strain Settled silent in the nest to brood slow Absence from song. The dropped leaf cools On the uncut grass, supple still, still green, Twining still these fingers as they listless pull The tangle straight until the tangle tightens And the hand is caught, another fallen leaf. The poetry of the earth never ceases Ceasing — one blade of grass denies belief Until its mere thread bears the grasshopper’s Whole weight, and the black cricket sings unseen, Desire living in a hole beneath the tangle’s green.

I listen and listen but how do I know Peace Peace in the plural says please or pleads I hear the whole song divide the state as one appeals past the last centuries’ pealing bells wren under eaves ruins another wren’s heaven dying sympathies appear as a pear or peas with her territory her tune I want a nest clinging to the twine Please Please in the plural not a flag a mead hall not a circumstance puts pain’s poor plea deeper in the apparent a stable not a stability where animals dream pressure the daylily plant the possible prayer and dreaming among them I tell the stranger pulling apart the sepal petals by their dusty crease in my mind I can’t I don’t know how to sing

You are for me as you cannot be For yourself, chaos without demand To speak, the amethyst nothing Hidden inside the trinket shop’s stone, Dark eyes dark asterisks where light Footnotes a margin left blank. You Don’t look up to look up at the sky. Your ears parenthesize nothing That occurs, that I keep from occurring, In the poem, on the page, as you are For me, not a shadow, but a shade Whose darkness drops from no object But is itself yourself, a form of time Spanning nothing, never is your name.