literature

Eulogy

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Daily Deviation

April 14, 2011
Eulogy by *Miseria-Cantare is "the neutral air that divides water and sky," a poem on loss and grieving with the earth.
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Literature Text

The dream-catchers are handmade
but each bear the same mark of boredom.
On the reservation,
the dirt is red and separated from the turquoise on sale.
The tops of the mountains have been scraped off
like whipped cream from pudding cups
of beautiful alien rock.

"Plateau," my mother says.
I am not sure if it is a name
or a command.

The lightning storms are brighter in the desert.
I sit perched on the horizon,
the edge of one loss to another—
given up my love, all my bottled water.
The mountains carry their own babies in the muddy puddles,
against the wind they huddle,
but their semi-circle somehow is just one great smile.

I let them tell me I walk over dinosaurs,
that their bones are beneath my feet.
Gray feathers,
brown beads,
earthy wire and string—
these are the weapons I possess
to protect me from their ghosts.
The hollows are for imagination
and the web for night-terrors,
like a brain fraught with holes from pens
trying hard to fill a page,
when you've only got a page left.
There has never been a mattress so hard
as the hollow loneliness,
the loud hollowness,
and the angels inside the angles inside the
sticky webs of dreaming lucid.

I make false promises to you
—you, the neutral air that divides water and sky—
I know I will be yanked into the cold clouds
like a clownish and perverse kite,
my spirit clenching tight like a sphincter
with the thunder of gremlins and cherubim.
(My spindle, the heart of this dream-catcher kite,
is somewhere on the ground.
Mother Earth. Her embrace
is pebble and rock?  No, I think a man
resides under my feet).

I shift and shake in my sleep.
The bed is made of glass. The bed is a kite
like a chandelier question, wondering what broke.
I spent my night dreaming bloody sunrise
two dozen times, and I am tired like
living marrow that swims in a grave,
too real to be anything but latent memories
of when I watched you fall,
and spasm with lightning
before you became a god.

The dream-catcher holds a certain pressure inside
like a spider weaving sleeplessness.
A loud hollowness is scratched into my
eyelids made of circles and spirals and
90 degree angles,
feathers'
latitudes and longitudes
strapping me in with a web of numbers.
The crisscross makes me dizzy.
All the numbers…even the words.
A certain pressure,
like lies
like lemmings.
I wrote the first version of this poem, "January 21" last year after a friend of mine died in a car crash.
Over the past year I have gone back and revised it, slowly, bit by bit.
I have borrowed pieces from other poems of mine that you may recognize; I'm not trying to disguise that.
I combined ideas, new and old, to create this final product, which is very dear to my heart.
Enjoy.
© 2010 - 2024 Miseria-Cantare
Comments50
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AgentCrazy2's avatar
Well, you know what they say,
TO ASCEND YOU MUST DIE
YOU MUST BE CRUCIFIED
FOR OUR SINS AND OUR LIES
GOODBYE