The brown of the green of the depth of the known
Of the tragic, to split it does make two happinesses:
A happiness sawn open port, a happiness sawn open
Starboard, a rift like a lure toward the good of the life
Of the cream of the sword of the pile in the clamor—
That love between the air and the armor. That sweat
Becomes a medium, coats the wound, is permission
For the tragic of the known of the depth to be green
For the brown of the known to be green for the kiss
Of the tragic to be depth of the sword for the cream
To be lured in the clamor toward a pile of the depth
Of the good of the furor like a rumor, of happiness,
That can emerge from the raw edge of the severance
Of a knot so tragic that it can’t be knotted yet again,
Nor wiggled loose from end to end to be used again,
Nor plunked into the depth of the black lake to sink
1,000 days or the length of it, the pain, to coil on the
Festered floor with the knot sat fat atop the pile wet.
Fantasy is as lovely as it is a brittle infrastructure for
An exit from the wiggly cage your dread has pinned
You in. Too wet, it all just bends. The sword, too, is
Too limp. Too wobbly to stand up on end, or to grip
Even, by the soft hilt that glows with red intent but
Pitifully, painfully so, when to even water’s tension
It relents and, forced to, splits in twain: two edges cut
And searing harmless vivid red, no blood from them
Curdles fractal in the depths nor swirls up at the dim
Thinness of the surface where the air begins again or
Where the density of pain unfurls from all sides like
A purl of smoke burnt by its rupturing, its effort for
Ubiquity to be overtaking limit so the air is scarred
Such that its tissue, rent and rendered new, shivers
Its sharp ripple thru the lapping surface of the lake
And to the grasses lazy at the edge of it, pondwater
Green, and to their roots, in brown, and down into
The depths where no shiver should be known to be,
As time’s compact has been interred here for years:
1,000 of them, 1,000 times, 1,000 cubic feet at a time
When there was no split to make distinction with—
No knot for the sword to try to love, no ill known
From depth as suffering alone, no sweat to rub into
The mechanism, no spleen to eat from, no browns,
No greens, no peat nor bog nor foot upon the skull
To help you under. No dream, spat upon, to polish
In your open cage. No rage. But a scream you can’t
Hear rippling emerges from a square cut into the air
That you will slowly note as yours—as your square,
Your air, your scream. Your green, your pain, your
Lure presented as anew to you, and be surprised by
It, delighted. And have your halves be lighter by it.
Logan Fry is the author of Harpo Before the Opus (Omnidawn) and of poetry in the New York Review of Books, Lana Turner, Conjunctions, The Rumpus, Fence, Annulet, New American Writing, and the Best American Experimental Writing anthology.
Photo obtained from Unsplash+.
