Light By Which I Read

   by Eric Pankey

One does not turn to the rose for shade, nor the charred song of the 
      redwing for solace.
This past I patch with words is a flaw in the silvering, 
                                                         memory seen 
        through to.
There I find the shallow autumn waters, the three stolen pears,
The horizon edged with chalk, loose where the fabric frayed.
Each yesterday glacier-scored, each a dark passage illumined by a 
       honeycomb.

                                  *

I begin to fathom the brittle intricacy of the window’s scrim of ice.
For years, I managed without memory—stalled, unnumbered, 
       abridged— 
No more alive than a dismembered saint enthroned in two hundred 
       reliquaries.
Now, it is hard not to say I remember, 
                                      hard, in fact, not to remember.
Now, I hear the filament’s quiver, its annoying high frequency, light 
       by which I read.

                                  *

River mist, mudbanks, and rushes mediate the dark matter 
Between two tomorrows: 
                      one an archive of chance effects, 
The other a necropolis of momentary appearances and sensations.
One, a stain of green, where a second wash bleeds into the first.
The other time-bound, fecund, slick with early rain.

                                  *

As if to impose a final hermeneutic, all at once the cicadas wind down.
The gooseberry bush looms like a moon: each berry taut, sour, aglow.
The creek runs tar in the cloud-light, mercury at dusk.
Then the frogs start up. 
                        Clay-cold at the marrow. A hollow pulse-tick.
And it seems, at last, I’ve shed my scorched and papery husk.

Copyright 2005.