“O sage [......] come, [let] me tell you / [......... let] me inform you / [.....] ...... [.....] ... you.”
—Babylonian Theodicy
I believe I am done with Babylon
until Parker and I bike through East London’s
serpentine dark. The coldest light defends us. What pure topology
can history unmake? The River Thames
begs for ablution, some pools too oblique
for the burial. And the hills, this-lucid like nothing else.
Riverweeds trace our elemental body
while the ones we love, the faultless ones, spin records in the warehouse
where we sleep. I ring my bell in darkness—
Hello, I’ve come to fight you only
in wars that have ended. Hackney Wick, boiler room
in my dreams, room I forget how to language,
this it rains.
I can’t believe what I was. I can’t believe what I am,
our bodies made
coalitional again. I talisman my longing, it stays evening
all day, I talisman so much
that larval river and the mutest swan, brightness
soaking in the green. It is a phase of being-alive I need
a cruelty to slip into, I need lilies
to shiver in animus before the sun. I light the stove
to cook eggs in specific ways. For you
I keep my brainless heart, the yolk that is not yolk,
but the nucleus I translate
from one tongue to the tongue that seized us, each of us
birthing the other
their center—
If I were the Euphrates, I could darken my braid.
If I were the Genesis, I could let poetry ruin my original mouth.
I am always ‘in metaphor’
or knifing out an exit, lucent the scythe
that gives violence to the sign, how it slits. It slits me
liminal. Will the angel of history
show a glimpse of his cards? We drink sun-warmed Sprite
in the Highgate Cemetery, my ointment-pure, my loving’s
conditional, all we’ve lost
we sublate into total loss. I only know Earth
as a concept I ruminate until the real you comes
I could bleed clean into.