Jorie Graham - Sea Change: Poems

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than ever before in the recording
of such. Un natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the bodyI look down, can
feel it, yes, dont know where. Also submerging us, making of the fields, the trees, a cast of characters in an
unnegotiable drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing itself.

Also sustained, as in a hatred of
a thought, or a vanity that comes upon one out of
nowhere & makes one feel the mischief in faithfulness to an idea. Everything unpreventable and excited like mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future takes shape
too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving
nothing in the way of trails, they are blown over, grasses shoot up, life disturbing life, & it fussing all over us, like a confinement gone
insane, blurring the feeling of
the state of
being.

Which did exist just yesterday, calm and true. Like the right to privacyhow strange a feeling, here, the right
consider your affliction says the
wind, do not plead ignorance, & farther and farther
away leaks the past, much farther than it used to go, beating against the shutters I have now fastened again, the huge mis
understanding round me now so
still in the center of this room, listeningoh, these are not split decisions, everything
is in agreement, we set out willingly, & also knew to
play by rules, & if I say to you now
lets go somewhere the thought wont outlast the minute, here it is now, carrying its North
Atlantic windfall, hissing Consider
the body of the ocean which rises every instant into me, & its
ancient e
vaporation, & how it delivers itself to me, how the world is our law, this in drifting of us into us, a chorusing in us of elements, & how the
intermingling of us lacks in
telligence, makes reverberation, syllables untranscribable, in-clingings, & how wonder is also what pours from us when, in the
coiling, at the very bottom of
the food
chain, sprung from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the in dispensable plankton is forced north now, & yet farther north, spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such that the hatch will not survive, nor the species in the end, in the the right-now forever un
interruptible slowing of the
gulf stream, so that I, speaking in this wind today, out loud in it, to no one, am suddenly aware
of having written my poems, I feel it in
my useless hands, palms in my lap, & in my listening, & also the memory of a season at its full, into which is spattered like a
silly cry this in
cessant leaf-glittering, shadow-mad, all over
the lightshafts, the walls, the bent back ranks of trees all
stippled with these slivers of
light like breaking grinsinfinities of themwriggling along the walls, over the grassesmouths
reaching into
other mouthssucking out all the airhuge breaths passing to and fro between the unkind blurrings& quicken me further says this new wind, &
according to thy
judgment, & I am inclining my heart towards the end, I cannot fail, this Saturday, early pm, hurling myself, wiry furies riding my many backs, against your foundations and your best young tree, which you have come outside to stake again, & the loose stones in the sill.

Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms, twelve blossoms on three different branches, which for us, personally, means none this coming spring or perhaps none on just those branches on which
just now lands, suddenly, a grey-gold migratory birdstill here?crisping, multiplying the wrong
air, shifting branches with small hops, then stillingvery stillbreathing into this oxygen which also pockets my looking hard, just
that, takes it in, also my
thinking which I try to seal off, my humanity, I was not a mistake is what my humanity thinks, I cannot go somewhere else than this body, the afterwards of each of these instants is just another instant, breathe, breathe, my cells reach out, I multiply on the face of the earth, on the mudI can see my prints on the sweet bluish mudwhere I was just standing and reaching to see if those really were blossoms, I thought perhaps paper from wind, & the sadness in me is that of forced parting, as when I loved a personal love, which now seems unthinkable, & I look at the gate, how open it is, in it the very fact of God as invention seems to sit, fast, as in its saddle, so comfortable& where does the road out of it go& are those torn wires hanging from the limbs& the voice I heard once after I passed what I thought was a sleeping man, the curse muttered out, & the cage after they have let the creatures out, they are elsewhere, in one of the other rings, the ring with the empty cage is gleaming, the cage is to be looked at, grieving, for nothing, your pilgrimage ends here, we are islands, we
should beget nothing & what am I to do with my imagination& the person in me trembles& there is still innocence, it is starting up somewhere even now, and the strange swelling of the so-called Milky Way, and the sound of the wings of the bird as it lifts off suddenly, & how it is going somewhere precise, & that precision, & how I no longer can say for sure that it knows nothing, flaming, razory, the feathered serpent I saw as a child, of stone, & how it stares back at me from the height of its pyramid, & the blood flowing from the sacrifice, & the oracles dragging hooks through the hearts in
order to say what is coming, what is true, & all the blood, millennia, drained to stave off the future, stave off, & the armies on the far plains, the gleam off their armor now in this birds eye, as it flies towards me then over, & the sound of the thousands of men assembled at all cost now the sound of the bird lifting, thick, rustling where it flies overonly see, it is a hawk after all, I had not seen clearly, it has gone to hunt in the next field, & the chlorophyll is coursing, & the sun is sucked in, & the chief priest walks away now where what remains of the body is left as is customary for the local birds.

Full moon, & the empty trees branchescorrectionthe trees branches, expose and recover it, suddenly, letting it drift and rise a bit then swathing it again, treating it like it was stuff, no treasure up there growing more bluish and ablaze, as the wind trussles the wide tall limbs in telligently in its nervous ceaselessnessof this minute, of that minute All the light there is playing these limbs like strings until you can
hear the icy offering of winter which is wind in trees blocking and revealing moon & its cold & in the house someone is sending instructions. Someone thinks death can be fixed. Inside it is magic, footprints are never made visible.

The moon slicks along this human coming and going with no prints to it. The moon all over the
idea that this all could be (and no one would mind) a game. Noise, priests, provinces, zip codes coil up out of the grasses towards it. Groups seize power. Honor exists. Just punishment exists.

The sound of servants not being set free. Being told it is postponed again. Hope as it exists in them now. Those that were once living how they are not here in this moonlight, & how there are things one feels instantly ashamed about in it, & also, looking at it, the feeling of a mother tongue in the mouth& how you can, looking away, make those trees lean, silvered, against the idea of the universalreally leantheir tips trying to scratch at it Until it sizzles in one: how one could once give birth, thats what the shine says, and that distant countries dont exist, enemies do, and as for the great mantle of individuality (gleaming) & innocence & fortunelook up: the torturer yawns waiting for his day to be donehe leans against the trees for a rest, the implement shines, he looks up.