Blackouts


Out of a sense of purity: blackout.
No other voice of any other
(God.)

No other voice
comes to her tiny garden.

No rain
but stinging nettles,
and no other soul but hers, parched.

On the footpath, a blue cypress, unhurt.
Tall as a July sun, reaching.

Its own opal halo flung wide on the landscape.

Wild and bruised.

Blackout.

~

Bruises on the damp nature.
Far from the sound of the lure.

What was it she promised when she was an imaginative child
whispering hard at her own low window, mouth to that low

opening — was it to love? to be better than any sword?
curled at her air-slit in between the house-stones

no higher than her two hands—window no larger than
her face, burning?

There — her sky — there — her sky — its feral, cobalt voice,
and sun that tasted of young honey.

A girl called Joan who would ask a thousand times — 
“To shut me out from the light of the sky?”

Who thought a nation
could be ordained.

Cypress. Crepuscule. Lamb. Blackout.

No other voice, a thousand times.
Like bees.

                                   (for Joan of Lorraine, her sky.)

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