NaPoWriMo: April 1, 2012

I'll be posting sections from a long poem I'm writing for a new book. Here's the first. PRELUDE X (from THE BRIEF REMEMBER) I will be apprentice to this study for her. My best gift is mania, drives me into knowing vacuums. I copy her gaps for the context. I retrace the mapless meander of her logic for empathy. Because I was born copy and the honor of that. Inside her is gaps and bursts. Some days the bursts are the most heartbreak. Other times we circle the same spots, and I try to be as I know she was with me once, our bleak and common future to reverse the sphinx. I’m fair to poor copy. That you don’t know her is your misfortune. Know what was, which was a hot planet’s core, a late summer’s best light. Still that, but the center of her, subject of my latest essays. Language was always between us. My job is also to bear the knowledge for all of us. I seek it out as if it were a hunger. I tell my children her brain is pocked with illness, and I summon up the softest image to tell the story. It’s a soft pink vulnerable jelly. It is translucent and contains the future. In this reverie I hold it in my hand and against a lamp because this is my form of intimacy. My nails trace the brown spots that mark her losses. Beautiful and sad and strange, I say because I’m making it into something else.