Hester Knibbe

Even gods, though they were born in our own heads, died out to myth. Just as no one can point to the source of the spring or later at sea can say: this is the water from deep in the earth, that flowed from the mountaintops, so is the stream of mortals and gods. About my origins I know nothing. I married the earth, a child grew in me, fell out of me at last, and I babbled: little mutt of mine, I’ll name you, dunk you in invulnerability. He smiled at me, held me tightly by the heel and said mama.

Wandered tonight through a city as ruined as a body with broken ribs and a bared heart. Looked for you there with cookies in my pocket, searched for a sigh, for movement in demolished streets and alleys. Tonight since I’d forgotten for a moment where you are, I searched for you with hope in my bones. But no matter how I lured you with my voice and my eyes, walls of debris grew up steadily around you, cellars seemed to creep around you. I remained alone with those cookies in my pocket and kept calling and walking.

It’s a beautiful world, you said, with these trees, marshes, deserts, grasses, rivers and seas and so on. And the moon is really something in its circuits of relative radiance. Include the wingèd M, voluptuous Venus, hotheaded Mars, that lucky devil J and cranky Saturn, of course, plus U and N and the wanderer P, in short the whole solar family, complete with its Milky Way, and count up all the other systems with dots and spots and in that endless emptiness what you’ve got is a commotion of you-know-what. It’s a beautiful universe, you said, just take a good look through the desert’s dark glasses for instance or on your back in seas of grass, take a good look at the deluge of that Rorschach—we’re standing out there somewhere, together.

The soil I’m walking over comes from deeper: a fire had done it in, a stewpot had suddenly popped and its contents streamed out wave over wave until it reached the water, until the sea called it a day and struck back with a counterwave. Stony nightblack dreambarren land where tawny thyme wrestles up and thistle is stitched to every bare thing. Over this malevolence I carry you in me, sevenmonths deadchild, out to the sea

Saved two children last night. They lay under thin black ice one gone blue, the other grey. I laid them out on grass that snapped under my step wrung their bodies warm and dry gave them the gust of my breath. Then I looked out at the morning that lay lukewarm on the water put on a tank top arranged some grasses in a vase fished two children out of sleep.

Did an argument break out in the kitchen that morning? Was there smashing of pots and pans: you want to eat somewhere else? Go on, get out! Or were they set outside, shrewd,

my love who shelters in his words sometimes falls silent for a sudden eternity breathes that silence into a bell of glass in which he calms storms he draws lee lines in what was it’s more like a firefirm crackling when he takes up words with ease in a single glance, caressing my body I read him day and night. What will it be like when he withdraws into the word old,

In one who doesn’t speak the story petrifies, gets stumbled over, causes hurt. Then, says the man who should know about the past, then is a word you need to learn now. Then lived lives had has a name a body, sacrificial hands so god might help us. Feel with your hands and feet back along these countless steps and hear the incessant bloodrush, its dark red presence. That was what the man insisted, in so many words, pointing to the ornate temple corridor, an altar conjured at its vanishing point.