Embodies Poem by Jorie Graham

Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms, twelve
blossoms on three different
branches, which for us, personally, means none this coming spring or perhaps none on
just those branches on which
just now
lands, suddenly, a grey-gold migratory bird—still here?—crisping,
multiplying the wrong
air, shifting branches with small
hops, then stilling—very still—breathing into this oxygen which also pockets my
looking hard, just
that, takes it in, also my
thinking which I try to seal off,
my humanity, I was not a mistake is what my humanity thinks, I cannot
go somewhere
else than this body, the afterwards of each of these instants is just
another instant, breathe, breathe,
my cells reach out, I multiply on the face of
the earth, on the
mud—I can see my prints on the sweet bluish mud—where I was just
standing and reaching to see if
those really were blossoms, I thought perhaps paper
from wind, & the sadness in
me is that of forced parting, as when I loved a personal
love, which now seems unthinkable, & I look at
the gate, how open it is,
in it the very fact of God as
invention seems to sit, fast, as in its saddle, so comfortable—& where
does the road out of it
go—& are those torn wires hanging from the limbs—& the voice I heard once after I passed
what I thought was a sleeping
man, the curse muttered out, & the cage after they have let
the creatures
out, they are elsewhere, in one of the other rings, the ring with the empty cage is
gleaming, the cage is
to be looked at, grieving, for nothing, your pilgrimage ends here,
we are islands, we
should beget nothing &
what am I to do with my imagination—& the person in me trembles—& there is still
innocence, it is starting up somewhere
even now, and the strange swelling of the so-called Milky Way, and the sound of the
wings of the bird as it lifts off
suddenly, & how it is going somewhere precise, & that precision, & how I no longer
can say for sure that it
knows nothing, flaming, razory, the feathered serpent I saw as a child, of stone, &
how it stares back at me
from the height of its pyramid, & the blood flowing from the sacrifice, & the oracles
dragging hooks through the hearts in
order to say
what is coming, what is true, & all the blood, millennia, drained to stave off
the future, stave off,
& the armies on the far plains, the gleam off their armor now in this bird's
eye, as it flies towards me
then over, & the sound of the thousands of men assembled at
all cost now
the sound of the bird lifting, thick, rustling where it flies over—only see, it is
a hawk after all, I had not seen
clearly, it has gone to hunt in the next field, & the chlorophyll is
coursing, & the sun is
sucked in, & the chief priest walks away now where what remains of
the body is left
as is customary for the local birds.