Untitled Poem by Jordan McLaren

I remember a sculpture,
caressed from mind and air,
a frictionless form, over which
eye and gaze would slide.
Its face was candid, always pleased
and eyeing joy at its world,
unworn by worship.
No lip could seize an atom of flaw,
nor the dwindling sun erase
its light with bloody honesty.
In its hands, folds of dusty cloth
spilled to their mother dirt -
their footsteps stained her with lies.

I am the creature of its shadow,
huddling with its tiny night
from the strident victory of the solar god
returning with a wrathful torch
to plant his unshakeable foot.
Fingers are held from trembling
around the crevices of its tumbled robes,
touching, flooding themselves
with feeling till the tips ache cold:
that garment is their sky,
fallen, smothering them, a blindfold,
a mask over reconquered sight
which sees crack and break and ruin.

The warm stone upon the floor
is nude and brown, mundanely hewn
of weathered land. Unveiled, its
face is unrepulsive, too ordinary
to shame the eye. Mud caked in a mould:
brother, equal. Heart and blood.
Roots through its nakedness
spread madness and mess,
blot the rock as red as a beast
of skin and nerve. Lust and hunger
force it, act and do.
Loss muddies the sand
in a vivid moment from its blink;
and I depose it from view,
disgusted by its life.

And now my eyes are full of mind,
transparent, deep and dark:
they grope for reason and miss.
Out of everything reel
lost shapes, missing hues.
The grass gulps dry bleach,
rustles a dying hiss over the
bones and their immortal impressions,
charred into the childless earth
in dark light-ink. The air breathes
neither seed nor raindrop,
too slow with its wounds
to spin them out.

And I am grey fossil wrapped
in sinew, bound in bandage
of creaking joint and peeling skin
and bloated with nothing.
Lethe's spring barred by stubborn faith,
I inch into the flickering distance,
drawn on by playing green
in the border of the air
and in the walls of the world.
A shoot, a fly, a bird,
a spot of blood from the barren cuts,
the faintest trickle or flow:
ignored, and asked to tell in hope,
do any of you grow?