This is a poem called "Lineage," and it deals with feeding--
it deals with ancestry.
It deals with all those invisible figures,
those invisible forces that work on our own language,
our own words, as if the ancestors were asking
for these bits, these syllables, these little shreds,
these particles of language, and as if in writing,
we are feeding them, feeding those demands, those shreds,
those syllables, those bits of nourishment.
"So many voices there vie for the voice, crowd sound
with the white pressure of their silences.
Sea, and the tall rooms just over.
They're filling again with mirrors.
armchairs, my own, as if driven, enumerations.
The moon there is the length of a line, the vase,
with its ragged red dahlias, another.
Trace, trace forwards, for only there eventually might issue,
might emerge not as entities, but as
the breath's very imprint, inflection, as the still moving
rumors of the otherwise obliterated.
Ivory, off-white, nacre: I read them
in negative, move at their restless extremity, forwards.
Press, they press me to say, say latch, shutter,
the jade ladders the angled slats make,
once fastened against the sea.
Ask that their silences finally be stilled, muted,
the sustained bar of the unexpiated edge.
Term, 'terminalis,' this side of speech, the awnings stiffen.
The charged barges running before the open breakwaters set
sail.
Our signs, emblems, are what there
is as offering, barter, as the small,
uttered tokens of some momentary placation.
Stray figures, figments of smoke,
their muslins, their bleached linens wreathed,
turbaned in smoke.
We survive, survive them, but scarcely.
Haul sound, the tiny shreds of its sustenance
forwards, as if language were merely language's edge,
its slight, still to be acquitted segment, move.
They're moving now through knuckles, wrists,
the itinerant sisters, sporadic brides, move.
They're moving me to say, say jonquil, urchin, kelp,
to feed them on the small saline scraps
of the water's reflections.
Figures from the far side, even their bracelets loose hoops
of smoke, the oscillum quavers.
The air's curtain runs taut.
Tell them-- tell them that the wind's glowing,
that the prawns of summer abound, that now towards dusk,
the pines are billowing from under.
Tell them we'd forgot, that we'd remembered, that the breath,
our breath's vessel, hadn't rusted, that one by one,
the scattered lights of the low, offshore islands, the estuaries,
turn on."