Poem by Greg Ford

"Divine Light" by Jane Chakravarthy



My Thing

No more equitable persona is open for adoption in my own air pocket. I am conversant with them all. I have watched them all go begging on no less elevated planes.

As if ink must flow, as if bitterness had never been painted once and for all by an old master’s rising insolence, the crowd suddenly has a heartbeat again, as if it were a summons to open the gate askew on that one word which is misery, to enter, and give forceful testimony as the ephemeris turns green with the wolves’ contrition.

Anticipating explosion, jubilant landslides, bonanzas, I return to the beginning, and torment, once more, the porpoise-backed ides of a stolen moment, until rippling like the orchestra’s wind section, like an invitation to take the air with my long hair streaming under the locomotive’s hood, with my cocked and floral armpits and the insight of a second-story man at my dungeon’s single station stop, until utterly confessed, at the focal point where the eyes of the Lacemaker meet, I have no need to ask, “What will it be like when it’s spring again?”

How serviceable of me to adjudicate between the roots and the leaves, to chart the sudden movements of the weathervane of the spoken word, everywhere we let fly—vibrating like a superman in this pillow talk’s deep-slept impersonality, searching, in this inexpedient experiment, for new ways to love the old you—to release my angel on the stumbling block.

Where the challenged-by-birth, the overheard-by-rote, the catlike mooncalf in the cheeky aqua light, the swiftly flowering Narcissus with his avocations, all who bear the password amongst the émigrés as their thing, also think of me.