Vessel and Visions

Vessel

 15 July 2022

At first my heart’s feet
were planted on coral
beds and in seas
of streaming vapour,
wind-lifted forms emanating
a soft and frequent light,
hovering on the edges—
everything tipping off
the breaking wands
of waves

Hands here
brought known bones
back from their creaturely
origins, to the sea
of another belonging

calling by cell to cell
ancestry thrumming
through whorling fingertips,
calling to the seabed’s
spooling songs and
sending them back out
ringing
and collecting
in these spheres.

*

I am reading
a book mostly
about strange men
who invent hot weapons
of destruction.

(When was it a woman,
apart from where she died
inwardly, yet stayed staid
silent?)

or / and who reduce the world
from figures of abstracted geometries
making equations and cyphers of –
for unmagical equivalents.
It is all great mystery
which will not bend
to lensed minds, will not fold
into collapsing inscrutabilities
Mystery will yet slide away along
dark fields of
gravity.

We have been so busy,
so gravely ill
with dark matters,
drowned photons.

* 

For two and a half months
my hands have been forming
balls and buckets of clay
into objects which take their forms
from a history of domestic form.

They are not vases but metallic bird
wing and dark star singing to distant star
fields and pulled from a dusky dawn’s
dream light.

These vessels stand
or kneel to the dust
of ancient caves
drawing memory
into their own clear
ring for belonging
and the search through
blanketed light—
this light, their light
our light
all light
downloading
simply
vessel.