Nadir: Metonym for a Feathered God

Healing would ring in, after illness picked her up, throwing her over a grey rock face,

so much was the sensation of falling, airborne, accelerating into the down, that lasted long.

Urine, falling out of the sky, coming after her, chasing her, with the gravity of the situation,

survival of incomprehensible destructions, now brought home after the war. Home.

Blows of the bastinado, followed to her sanctuary. Sore footfalls, followed by falls. Get up. 

Here is comfort? Here is bed. Here is hearth. Here is here. Nurse? Book.

Opening the cellar door, stepping deep, nether, waiting to be eaten with the root vegetables. 

Confusion between the dead and the living, treading an unseen line. Carrots. Potatoes.

Where is the wire that detonates? Where the pit trap, an invisible ingress? Search tenderly

through cracks in the earth. Look for entry. Feel into the air for slight shifts in temperature.

Observe swirls of water, perceive the seam between the places where two opposing energies collide to form a splash. 

Here would be the door, finally. Open and spill.

Conforming with death, going underground into silence, into cloister, into the stems of grapes 

all eaten. Mourning, the thick, heavy, bitter empty stomach. A white tongue.

Active sorrowing, all clothes pitch and raven, worn upon starless soot, active bereavement,

voicing nothing current from the lips of a departed soul; no longer a who, no longer any length.

Sloe blackthorn lamentations, black sorghum; meditations not eaten, but watched, in cool fog

unflinching, undramatic. This must be part of the cure. No stagecraft, just sitting.

Here under curtains of annihilation, knitting euthanasia, downfall and necrosis,

Saint Vitus, an old dog that cannot stand, who bites hard when offered help, cloudy eyed.

Poltergeist, moving things around the house at night, pulling out a bag of flour, scattering handfuls across the kitchen. 

Strange odors climbing up out of the drains, echo of a living voice?

Death, working on the disassembly line, removing cog from wheel, lost zeal for taking away, 

souls, the fresh breath of flowers. Stems, severed by knife, giving a face and a neck, no return.

No time or meaning; sense stretched, reason scribbled over by a thousand hands, with livid ink, all hers, mine, yours.  

And one nose, smelling: salt, wax, copal, soil drunk red beet, breeze.

Days, dream-life of the copy; soul, always present elsewhere, able to see every single star 

that shows its light down onto the earth where our shadows sit, waiting to get news.

What could become if death decided to stop gathering pyre wood and set down that basket?

Death, throwing dust behind the bookshelves and the door to the kitchen, always open.

We are projected onto the face of this planet, just a small extension of all that we retain. 

We remain elsewhere. Whole truth lies on the other side, behind what is behind our eyes.

Hollow bone, filled with marrow, the confusion between the living and the dead. Remember sap.

There is no cure for being alive: seeded fruit split from the greatest tree; sacred vegetal icon.

Vivacity certifies life in this universe, yet confronted animals, are a common motif; claws, crisscrossing lines. 

Who lies beneath the shade of an arboreal arbor, safely in the ground?

Who is heartened, in spite of every blow, at dawn, when lifted, bodily, from within earth,

and held aloft; the sum of ears, hearts, all mortal parts, resurrected by dawn and birdsong? We.