Of Body, Beyond, and: A Mysterious & Beautiful Creature
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OF BODY, BEYOND
If it is a fruit left out upon the asphalt in the airfor four plain hours, or swaying from the cementsky of a prison cell, dying unaccounted for—unseen, unloved boughs quivering in a lit jail.If the mother is fighting, peeling rage & grieffrom her mouth. My child, my child, my child.If we watch, keep watching, keep saying No.If it is a word, false & uncomprehendingin age. If justice cannot be detected here. If it can everbe apprehended & saved from the white sun’shunger. If you knead jet pulp & blues music acrossmountains & schoolyards. That’s America. You try to teachby the flagpole or the gun. Soul music? If the throatof a bee is too wide. Honey, if the pupil of the gunconstricts & aims its first love at you.If it is strange to them & love to you. Are youlove & life to them? Whose liberty wrote your nameacross its salty hull? Roots. Kola nut. Magnolia. Your mother’shome & everlasting bloodied treasure. If the song approachesyour shadow in the yard, burn it.What do I mean? What the hell do I love?If some unlawful music opens the gate, blinking& unbuttoning its jeans. Knees, stained glass. Burningcross. What do I mean about funk & jazz? We are the dance.The horn in your skull waits for a borrowed matchin the singer’s throat. A terrorism by truth. Betterburn the song. Melt me. It belongs to what is inconsolable.Some seeds yield a deafening famine. If you mustguard the wild fields beyond your home where god dances& bursts like one hundred strawberries be sureyour hands are seen working by the strangerswho pass & ask themselves about your worth. [End Page 265]
A MYSTERIOUS & BEAUTIFUL CREATURE
Begin with what flesh does.Begin with what the eye could make outin its intimate, wishing well. There were mirrorsthat gave the unfinished self an image. Vowsgiven away in the flush of the moon’s oldest dune.Begin with the body opening, so as to pushits lush, unassailable terror toward beauty.Grief recognizes itself as a facerecognizes its own devastationin a mirror. I tell you I unmade my endingwhen I looked at my mother’s dyingface. From the blackened shore I pushed awayred shards. A self exiled from the womb& moonlight of origin. Original, the beginningrequired some scope of loneliness, somecomprehension of agnostic waves turningupon each other, devouring light, heavingthe drowned tongue toward my feast.Begin with the mouth opening, & the gullswinging through the windpipe. Wingsbegging a confession of streaked pinions.Begin with what God imagined as cathedral,as vault, as clay, as cave painting, as tomb. I tell youone morning I rolled desire awayfrom its fragile source. Why make a picture ofwhat has been broken open in love?Begin with force, the sea insists. Air curvesits blade against the paradise of my mouth. Beginto say it—this is my love—without turning backtoward any likeness. [End Page 266]
RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS, poet and visual artist, is author of four collections of poems, the most recent of which is Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books, 2015). She is the recipient of a number of fellowships at such arts retreats as Yaddo, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, and Cave Canem Foundation. Her literary and visual work has appeared in The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Lit Hub, Apogee, Southern Humanities Review, Transition, and many other periodicals. She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
