Erin Mouré

There was a cold
In which

A line of water across the chest risen
...

Unspeakable. The word that fills up the
poem, that the head
tries to excise.
At 6 a.m., the wet lion. Its sewn plush face
...

Courageous lair "might prevail"
Waking up to her your "yellow coal"

Steals a its way
...

1. And if you were to leave me for my faults
2. I'd not defend my lameness, walking halt
3. and from my trust I would elide your
...

I can t sleep for grief.
I can t sleep for longing.
I can t sleep for wanting happiness!
Mother, how will I live.
...

I am in the little field of my mother
Her field touches
oaks of the valley
and I touch the faces of my corn
...

A little river and a big river
the story of the bronchials
Some of earth's heartbeat but not all
...

By its wheated thread, it penetrated
worked tin, my lips' opening.
By its parasite, it penetrated
deeply my pectoral cloud, to merge with
sky.
By its singular anchor, it penetrated
bleeding me of verse in the sea's
oration.
And so. All coasts arrive
at this barrier.
And light spreads. Imprudently, the melee
in the body raises its unique mask.
For here i did not exist yet,
wings open, and so, and so, this.
...

Tomorrow's hand-locked.
Nothing can uncurl its fingers.
Artful
or touching on artful, it is a suit unworn
as if the suit in itself, hung up and artful
could jab outward and deliver me a punch.
Nothing about scandal.
It's a suit in itself unworn
about to unhang itself and
deliver me a punch.
Nothing gives priority to such a meeting.
Nothing soars, no stars, no moon.
Everything's a mimic.
As such, it's gone punchy. And i'm aching
or loquacious,
veering closer, mug up, leaning into the punch.
...

My eyes, not seeing you, to all else
go blind.

Is it you, from far off, blinding me?
...

Lisbon is sleeping;
the spaces under the staircase breathe like
a lung.
...

Nowhere yet has a footfall proven
adequate to its situation
Waiting for the boots to call out
from their stall by the door
...

Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen
Paul Celan
This pietà
is a man
in the care of another man
as tomorrow begs them
into the most gentle
torsion of a foot in the back

this back, in turn, touches the foot
back, gently

!flesruoy fo erac ekaT
...

And so, i took the temperature of the mouth.
And so, i took the temperature of the armpit.
Washing it first, patting it dry, closing
the arm to the body,
tucking the elbow where the waist is.

And so, i took the temperature of the anus,
bending my arm around my back
to do so.

Churchbells rang out, it was noon.
No-one was outside on the road.

Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere:
the same temperature.
...

basically driven
One of us was scorched by it.

It caused even stone to crack open, repeatedly dust
entered even the sky.

We are an adjustment of the pod's rupture,
that seizes locally the seed of the sky,

here were we chosen, separately groping asphalts,
so as to seize, innately, the sky.

Oh, i never took your hand without piquancy,
when i said gracefully the said things,
i never said them for the sake of saying.

In the net of this sky our indebtedness soars,
all of it above us, as if pretending,

though in seizing the sky nearest us
we inch forward, we are penetrated by
all the sky waking up as if it were naturally ours.

So i let ache ache in me, so that i do not lose you
from my eyes, let you
penetrate my seeing so gentle so i may seize you
in orbit, as sky.
And if you won't stay, be not impervious to our we,
if you won't mix your breath with me, exalting breath . . .
If the perfume of you were to stir up breath
i would exalt, as a foot does,
strangely rising

or a seed, seizing locally the grass of the sky.
...

Create voice with bone,
tip voice with steel,
die voice with a journey,
clot voice with a word
and you, unconditionally
Plough with a stone from the pyramids
plough with a stone
and don't splay the earth, and don't splay
it, gather singular
singular
Without make-believe,
without making time.
...

it will come in spring
In intimacy much bigger than our destiny in time,
we part yet in kisses
perhaps bound in parting's parting, the de-parture of parting
beyond the one,
in the disturbing rain of lava,

you, continuing in the great sea of forms, yet
knowing your own self, yet
made of enduring material whose mystery seizes me,
it seizes me that this could die.
To see this cast, as clear as any being which knows itself
whose mystery, so dear to us, comes clear
to seize morning.

To be alert in this seizure, with our inner coursing,
a gift of the stars that traverse more intensely in us
to enter our breath
strenuously as the me begins its story, as you
turn back through the turnstile to your glad oasis,
seeding matter
strenuously
as my words wrap the ache of absence
so my head will no longer see.

Or to be alert as we can, for what we yet feel inside us.
I'll be alert, for what can no longer be
named in the uprising
from the mists of possibility,
yet is no more than what is singular in itself
and, unsuspecting, knows itself, narrated intimately;
its future predicates so powerfully arrayed in the coursing that
centres us,
spartan as a planet released to spin its size against the pitons
of feeling and of plants,
is,
intense as knowing, as the pyramid
that unites us triply in every single strand.


II

All is simple. Touches simplicity. Fully
divines the unfathomable.

All is touched closely, is touched
by closeness, filled
with the tragedy of the seer
who is never again seen.

All is touched perfectly
in spring,
though unconjurable in this cold, i
constantly know
it will arise from grass that will rise anew to witness
words from mouths that utter them,
witnesses of the mouths' intimacy
which is intimacy's inner well,
that in itself seizes shyly what
is of the earth,
and which implicates us without judging:
the infinity of my arms risen against gravity

to hold yours without relenting
in the embrace's powerful touch,
fully serene in arms' mystery.


III

Here every parting alerts us in the plurality of you,
seeded as one, in the hourglass:
where, in every parting, at once
there is the clamour of the fall and,
above it, a twice-fallen silence.


IV

The cloth of the unknown alerts us with this you, waning,
what we cannot see yet of its weave
and what spins light outward, independent of our features
helps us to think out fruitfully the seeds we will let grow,
for the weave that alerts us knows
the cherishing seized in all alerts, in all knowledge.
I see myself fallen into this you
as it arises in us, in the tenderness of seeds
irrepressible as they are beloved.


V

If i was not duped in letting such happiness
enter me,
was i then duped
mistiming the vast signs
that had melted stone? Or
that held in my embrace were just mercurial
twinned over and over,
risen in mirrors?
Time, so big, worked to deprive my voice
of the embrace it had assumed,
all lustre, all glow in those days of odes
i did speak toward her.
They were to me hazard's just accomplishment, yet not duped in
all they set aglow in me,
now past, and yet so much is still glowing.


VI

So i remain
steadfast in what i am,
my mouth steady in solitude, shielded from cold,
assuming my own happiness
i shake off the preterit
to don what is ahead
in myself, again, what is to the right, and yet
to the left of me, above and yet
under me, placating
the preterit so ruined
preterit that still makes me sweet and light:
sky—stars,
earth—air,
shadow—hers, burst into leaf.


VII

. . . it gnaws me too much, is too asymmetrical,
hard to be insouciant
in the sphere of her presence.

To see her is to stand in the fate of the sun,
its eventual explosion as a star,

and to step with daring into the increase in light,
more light than can ever reassure me.


VIII

To spring from our own earth
in the very sowing of such light; though winter
now ices lichen at the oasis of our dawn, spring
will write the length of laughter.

Springing from my own centre
when, human and alone, i'm haunted
by the net of love,
or purely and simply when winter
falls away and spring
is misting space in a wide circle
seeding hearts intimately
with the space of love's own unseizable margins.
Amazingly there is a cure
in spring,
the knowledge of seeds that speak life in the sowing
as earth speaks already of earth.

But more urgent than anything
we are seeds, we are
what wanders in all partings still,
and our place is also in the light that streams from eyes
or from a field, the field of grasses
grown before our eyes- us with our ourness
not yet undone, though some say it hardens as do molten metals,
yet we still sow fire with our beings
to help us work in work's torrent
in the place of cherished tremours
in which
our work yet is to be born.

More urgent than anything
we are seeds, and implicated
in the rising of our own selves as we hazard a way outward
to where exaltation rises,
to where parting bears the name of spring.
To be in being and laud the phenomenal, again and again
laud the phenomenal.

To be yet in being
these seeds spring up for us, unseizable
in our own earth.
...

At night in the valley of penedos erguidos
a glint of wolfram

the uncles' job at night
to touch the glint of wolfram
...

In a woman's arms lies a man
his skin is blue and his lips are blue
and his chest is a hayrick
flat with forks of blue
...

It was at the fountain where I washed my curls,
Mother, and where I did loosen them
and me
oh lucent
...