}} Recovered Memory |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Recovered Memory

Spur of slipped

serif

             a jolt of brittle

                         outside, in a rasp,
 
 
akenning of a not-

             given-shape, a noise

like grass and trees

             unmouthed, long water
 
 
ripening,

             wind-flutes of bamboo,

some kind of this-ness

             lost, a seed of many
 
 
silences begets

             its pitch

and shift, coughs a glottal
 
 
choke of stress

             the affricates align

             the soft of lauds begins

to pattern in my mind
 
 
and I become of scales

                         which lip

                         my skin to pearl

                         and now I know
 
 
that I was there—

             zoeticin the plangent

             dark, a breathing

             through a hyoid bone
 
 
an unhatched word,

             a stuttering in

             the throat of mud,

             just as fish dried into legs
 
 
and Earth was tamed

                         by naming

 
 
            Recovered Memory (Cordite, 44, Gondwanaland, 2013)