Burnt Offering

Burnt offering

33 Burnt offering Like old accusations – sweep them away – burn them – fireplace like a waste paper basket, papers piled on old ash old thoughts, unfinished stories, letters, journals – sore throats, blocked ears, headaches, listlessness – how many years it takes how many lists it takes them all – through grievance past grief back to ground solid enough here where we’ve built our house close to the sea, overlooking the river, the valley, poppies in the wind now and earlier in the season watsonias filling the hill behind the camphor bush filling the air and next year, who knows, maybe the porcupine will have got them like he got my father’s lilies – I dreamt the dream I called Lily Joseph is Dead. Who the hell is Lily Joseph asked the homeopath when I told her we could hardly stop laughing like you laugh like when you’re kids like my son and his friend, Jessie and Paul, laughing, sixteen and seventeen and how long will love last forever 34 who is Lily Joseph I asked the librarian (when they told me she was dead) my mother and the librarian looking at me as if to say: really! Didn’t I know! the poet laureate, she said; consciously, who is Lily Joseph, I asked myself, really: the woman-who-does-the-right-thing – like Helen Joseph – in history – St. Joseph’s Lily (not the real-wife Mary who fucked it up with the angel, literally) Lily, Lily Briscoe, the artist, at the start of the story – Lily, like Laurel, the one who wins the laurels – Lily Joseph is dead was the name of the dream like Morrison was the name of the poet in the story I started to write like How – I didn’t know any word for it – how “unlikely” like simply to be I dreamt of Lesego; I dreamt of that poet with all the burning you could ever dream of all hell let loose – who could imagine it let alone live it; he wouldn’t have come if it weren’t a crisis – he’d lost his bravura, his beret, he came only with tenderness – how to make something of this how not to doubt or not only to doubt how not to be the old woman sleepless at the start of the work unable to write – that story I was beginning, writing, opening with the poet untying the knot, letting the line loose for the little boat to cross – 35 After “Lily Joseph” I knew I would never write that story – even for Morrison, my protagonist, my burning poet, my grieving poet, to keep him from counting the syllables, counting the days, to keep him from burning his mattress, burning his skin, burning his poems when I think of you in your ashes, burnt, like who knows how many countless, uncountable, unaccountable, unaccounted for, incinerated who might never have been – take this day, here, take it all its clarity, all its gold – ...