enough rope

   

         

enough rope

                I'm trying to lean into those

        marshes and hear

    what comes clean,

        what comes through changed, 

having needed us.

                Jorie Graham

                from: Breakdancing

don't we parent through our own

story or stories and not only

what we remember in our minds

but what we remember in our body

or bodies: the stories that go

straight through the smoke

of letters beginning to be tuned

to words straight through yes and

into the flesh.  and some find a home

there these stories conjured from

their rest by circumstance by

coincidence like touching 

the shape of a particular type

of boatman's knot and holding

it in the middle of my fist 

knuckles over knuckles and

suddenly there's the boy who would

later be killed in that speed of taking

a right angle curve in the edges

of ditch  and night as deep as oak

pitch or whatever you wish pitch

of drunk-driving roll-over meets 

trees... those memoires live in me they live

in my biceps and triceps and maybe

a chord or two in the crotch where

the rope knot hunched up like a pommel

horn it's the place he held to

when he took me into his humble

bony clavicle into those trees

along the creek until there was

no more to go into and who knows

if it was the tension of two

bodies almost able to hover

above the unsudden spring ice melt 

then the one block finally disgorged

enough to let the winter come

through who knows who it was

who let go first.  the shaking

was the same clavicle to scapular

closed around the flesh and bone

the boats of the pelvis the shaking

behind the fist of rope who knows

as much?  it is at once

a place of holding on isn't it as much

as it is a place to let go to and watch

it swing first with people

and then unoppressively by it's 

lonesome breeze swing animal 

swing stiff flaccid stiff flaccid 

going the only way its abandonment

can go roped to the limb slow, slow

eroding while the both of us are thrown

one into this future and one into etched

memorials set in front of the ocean

to be touched in mornings, during day

times, during hot July fire

in the sky while it all breaks 

apart like fraying, like it shouldn't

but does because that's the way we weather

it, god-dam-it, that's the way we weather it.