SUSAN SONDE
CANTICLE FOR THE BLUES
I have seen them standing lately between wolf and human, the sudden and aberrant, the
stink of their ordure in the nests, in gardens among the flowers they uproot with their blind
rakes. They stretch the membrane, elongate the birth canal, exude promise and deliver
pain. I, who was conceived by a knife should sweep myself off, dissolve but I love too much
the company of your faces staring back at me from mirrors, am welded by you, hammered
in fact. And when you trill my name feel myself more than metaphor, my soft round skin
made larger than my circle of immunity. Like the tongues of flames you caress me although
I sizzle alone in my dawn to dusk drawer, my knife-thrower’s hands always thrusting.
I live daily in the error that the hairs my pores bestow are trees. To each I’ve given a heart
power in the pumping, smell of river in the blood, their corkscrew meander, skin rushing
from waterfalls and people knowing little or nothing. I need a ground plan to accompany
this flood plain. Boundary stones, line drawn down the middle of this page and my iambs to
congregate quietly on one side or the other.
Haunted nights, your inhabitants are subject to hallucinations, their hallucinations are
people. People want to outlast the sun, officiate at the interment of their own flesh. What
pulls them from their root
is not the sky so often seen lightless now, not the cities storms sweep from maps. In cities
wheels creak like canticles sung in scales, wind makes chance notes in their alleys: the
wind, the scales struck down by day’s annulling blue.
Here, take these cut flowers from my hand in recompense. I wrapped each in its own gauze
ribbon, the ecru of an early frost. They’ve crammed, these few just to be here with you in
rhinestone mode: all petals alight. Radiance reflects. Is that not its purpose? Answers
please because my church is on the rocks, the crucifix needs fixing, priests are on drugs,
nights too
fall on the needle. I believe that someday verses will stride the earth again and make it
quiet, the spread of interstates shall benefit bipeds and bivalves that can’t stay warm long
enough to reproduce will find their own sentient solution. Maybe wolves will too when they
learn how to impregnate humans, and humans adopt the ways of wolves. Humans are
harried, their faces too full of world. They two-foot it around the planet, bargain with the
moon. O over-zealous moon. The heavens don’t owe you a living. The deities are dirt poor,
the poorest of the poor.
Heaven is a road show. Road shows like medicine shows are small dark cities, their mayors
are the Gods, Gods performing in blackface. Their faces don’t reflect. Rain falls but
doesn’t quench. The earth is not a cure-all, wind not a planet. We sideswipe the stars, light
lands on top of us. It doesn’t weigh much at all but our scars shine long after.
Susan Sonde is an NEA Recipient (poetry) and the Capricorn Book Award recipient for IN THE LONGBOATS WITH OTHERS (New Letters). Susan’s work has appeared in Barrow Street, Boulevard, The North American Review, Southern Humanities Rev and many others.