Hekate

Hekate

I pulled my body along

the air just coarse enough.

Just enough salt

to hold her

you know, her

triadic

dark eyes, olive

wrong pantheon

on the street

say it all

the way one does:

here’s all of me

whatever I am.

A hot city

one of those

places you never

leave futzing along

the docks, historically;

but no ships

I’ll never come back

but never left

so much chutzpah

and a crate falls on its own.

Who’s responsible?

We were just here

or here was just us

with all the romance

of the past, young

on someone else’s time.

Must have been 

against them:

fate over work

cecini I sang you

sang me felt rough

fateful

she stabbed me

in the thigh

grandpa’s dagger

I held her close

not to pull it out

I held

–at last!– past her

guardianship

or was it

a Galleon, or the

English Channel

she stabbed, I 

can’t remember

just the red

shaded air its

local mercy 

a hot drink

on a hot day.

Slowshape of cathexis

staring hard to wake

the bees every morning

one way or another

pulled to it from afar

to fix the dyscrasia

the blood’s thread:

leads leaves past

you presently along

pulled from afar the

hill come whole

to meet you, a book

open only you forgot

how to read, only this way

the doors bang you

in and out 

the logic voluptuous

I mean tenuous

rub of wing, blind

shoulder bound with

animals or angels were they?

grit of here

my stars this pleasant

friction or fiction

the whole pageant

succumb to teleology

mask of oak and moon.

–I am what jumps from the proof. Letter or stone,

an elixer not of memory but of reminding                     [Pheadrus]

its unscrupulous service to the blue foot, ask me;

I am the stone, and the consequence of a read letter,

I know. Your touch. Your asking. I house hot acts

register desperate answers as new days

cross my self–suspected path. Some of the tale all of the telling.

The whole story

but no sequence

we got it backwards

daughter seeks mother

every step leads

step borne along

the city implicit:

rest the word

you carried all

day no place to sit

a slick fate

the city problem

we call language.

Knowing no sequence, she comes with two 

torches, the old moon’s boots

from the trees with their ceaseless prattle.

The whole story

she says it, my life

stumbling down

Avenue A

brushed my hand

against dog fur

against the grain

this is who I am.

Against nothing:

I lodge my answer

follow these lights

lampadephoros 

this mother we call listening.

I say the whole truth quickly. That’s all I know. [C.S., H. H. to Demeter]

The Satyr

In my mask of moon and oak no mask

just the teleology, waiting for you to enter

the sky again, the trees, our old tools;

enter with the last of you,

bring your string.

“I’ll be a leathern lady,” you said once.

Enter with what you’ll be

the present house of your own wake

that touch waiting there, spread out: a moon

caught in the listless trees, waiting for you to mean.