The Great Noticing

poem #127

This is plenty. This is more than enough.
Geoffrey Hill, 'September Song'

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photo by the author

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The fraternities come 
together again — odd ships 
together in international seas; 
polychrome bombings
and their egalitarian percussions; 
hot days; wildfires planned, 
reigned in, begot in the green 
continental womb
like speechless antichrists;
smoke that renders the sun
a hieroglyphic stand-in for itself:

            the Great Noticing is upon us,
and the gods are suddenly 
under the handsomest jaws, 
looming open and closing 
on the old thin veil
the young are newly frantic 
to preserve.

Waves, as ever, opaque 
themselves against endless dunes 
that swell like the oeuvres
of artist-somnambulists,
flash like the impossible pulse 
of sheared being from the black 
mouths of Sagittarius A* — 
and the seas, like the elderly, 
grow dark and slow 
with everything.

There is blood that makes this brain 
an island, and ceases only to flow—
it will remain and elegize
the justice of its first unthrown shape: 
the early ships arriving 
and retreating,
before the trade in strange flowers
and dangerous language 
unsmoothed the pale matter’s 
soft tectonic roll,

            and we began, 
with laudable industry,
to saturate the coastal towns 
and tiered gardens
with aqua vitae, hoping never 
to have to leave the aristocrat vistas 
alone with themselves
in their pink sensitivity —

            that the whole economy 
might be imbibed
to grow like a tree in a fairytale, 
from our mouths 
and make us live forever.

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