Shards of light in my periphery: soon everything will be
light. One total amniotic presence, it will call to us, it will be
the turn of the day, only the mockingbird brags
at that late hour. I have been w/ the dead, it was painless,
not even dull: then I was born, light broke over me
like light & I lay in the shallows breathing in the water. La,
we walked out to the tightly wooded zones & dry
exposed flats punctuated by dune grass & frequented by cruel
winds in April, that being the sweetest month, swifts blew
past us like charred dollar bills, a blackbird crested w/ brilliant
tumors of flame, the ruby-crowned kinglet held court
in the scrub, curt & ablush. Radiant depressed intelligence,
little psalm, you have slept once & will sleep forever—
show us again the wind pouring through quaking grass,
cinnabar moths in the hackonechloa, the heads of thalictrums
shaken like pom-poms, the ha-ha a blur in the rain.
Toby Martinez de las Rivas has published three collections with Faber & Faber: Terror, Black Sun, and Floodmeadow. He has a selection in Penguin Modern Poets 7: These Hard & Shining Things and is the Blackburn Distinguished Artist in Residence at Duke University.
Photo by Annie Spratt for Unsplash+
