binding

A sinuous poem that loops its constituents into a pattern of recurrence and variation. We start in the wine-dark of regret and sleeplessness, doors refusing access to light, ‘the light on the other side of the darkness / under the cliff that stitches the voice of my mother / to the ground.’ A mother’s voice is the sound of blackberries falling into a bucket, sticky on the tongue, juices running crimson and black. A mother’s voice stitches a silver lining to a cloud. It is the flashing needle, the turn in the dark that conjures a daughter’s shining face. Every mother is a daughter turning and turning in the dark to call to her own daughter. This is the needle that stitches the weave of generation, blackberries under a cliff, silver cloud behind the door of two in the morning. This is the needle of biopsy and shadow stitching, painful and pluripotent. Oh, it is simply pouring down.

Pouring

It is two in the morning
This is the needle
the silver lining is all around her,
it is simply pouring down.

door after door is shutting
falling into the bucket.
all around her, all around
her shining face.

If only I had not poured
If only I had not poured and poured and poured
If only I could get past

the voice of my mother
and the voice of my mother
the voice
of my mother

And so there are insistences, supple with being, with participles and prepositions that twist away. Conditionals and subjunctives appear to stutter but in fact inundate. They pour down in the way of inundations, excessive where excess is not needed or welcome until (suddenly) (a flip and two twisters) the world fish is gulping back its floodwaters and there is only the sound of rain in the night. Oh, it is simply pouring down.