Rebecca Ariel Porte

Soul, don’t complain, says Senhal, who means by “soul” a thing like “future,” possesses without knowing it not soul, but future, is little present, Senhal, & less past when this she shares, not always willing all, the pale pearl earth with you & shelters in her heart a stunted lemon tree, inviolate, & shielded by a sour ring of fire, the kind that keeps a Valkyrie asleep. Always born too early, Senhal lights these candles not to read by, but to watch the diamonds flower & die within their hot, blue nuclei, which seem to flicker with secret intent that fails, all told, to comprehend her. & arguably, this darkness is, for her, the best of them, refusal of the soul she never recognizes as refusal of the future which she is instead of all her otherwises — & might she have been — conscience-calmed — perhaps — or else a bird of the earthly paradise in which one barely needs to eat or else subsists on manna or some other fragrant zero denuded of the tang of death & the numb green shade, a starry zone, orthogonal with luminous errata, in which a lake of ultramarine has been used with never parsimony in all the places where blue is required to smudge a Thule out of sand & sea & air, a seeming there that seeming wants to hold her in its arms, in which one could be one & yes the ripe quicksilver that the artificer poured into the throats of statues to give them voice had never brought the air alive with hoarsest cries & muffled pleas (lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber did they cry?) as if nor it nor any thing mercurial had ever learned to savor love & poison in one mouth?