for cm clark (29)

imago for countless seasons

for cm clark

i shift my gaze to the hermit crab
land-prone itinerant, borrowed baggage
craven & familial, we set our sights at sea-level,
where nothing wilder to sniff settles
than an abandoned whelk,
a cracked conch
waiting for the nearest wave
from “sea-level”

ma cherie, there’s no need to suck
in yr breath when emily dickinson’s
name is invoked or spoke aloud.
u were never her, not in a thousand

lifetimes; nor were u that split metallic

gold pupal case, that exuvium that

wore her famous face & contained

u for a time.
u have been imago for countless
seasons. yr wing veins taut with
haemolymph. u fly gloriously free &
unfettered by earthly constraints,

a metamorphic, flying far & multiverse

wide, piercing the layers of time &

space stealing words from caravans

& country fairs, from a desert’s bleeding

sunset & a dervish’s whirling white morning,

from a thousand parallel worlds. u forever

fly to love, past the hermit’s cave, high

in a thousand & one night black skies,

under the all-seeing stare of a million stars,

seeking yr stealer of souls, the one who

collects & protects yr wild & fecund heart,

but u wisely drop yr stolen words like

bread crumbs so that u find yr way back

home. u fly forever to love, but yr gifted

grace is to bring love to life in the words

u toss on yr pages like an opele chain, those

magical syllables stolen from those caravans,

from sabian & chaldean merchants &

mendicants, from the wandering melevi,

that makes yr beloved coalesce into

quicksilver sanguinity, materialize & make

slippery transcendent seduction in

momentary pauses in ordinary thought

that illumine life’s meaningfulness,

while wry & dry emily is stuck in her

timeless thoughtbound prison: in an

eternally mundane struggle against male

power or the technical originality of her

poetry or her variety of themes or range

& depth of intellectual & emotional

experience – u have flown past & thru'

all of that. u know already that yr

participation in the presence is quite

beyond words & thought & thus yr poetspeak,

yr vibrantly magical verse, neither lyric,

plainspeech nor constrained by manwrought

convention, is but flowing ligatures of

runes & sigils that create every kind of

love out of chaos.

© Joseph McNair;2009