Frank Gibson
inspiration piece
lori B (Bloustein)
response
I
it begins with a crazy almost –
a tenuous testing from above, from below,
the inside, the outside. then a sudden unanimity
produces the THUD of an unexpected, awkward alignment.
spark. conception. reception. miracle seed inside a seed.
a seamless velvet blackness, dense beyond matter.
infinity lurks inside a Möbius strip of no-thing.
and wouldn’t you know,
this jumbled start arrives
fraught with Longing –
o beastly, relentless fuel!
propelled from a blissful sea on a tide of
fierce contractions, ineluctably edged towards exile,
a final ferocious wave spits out a blind, wet blob – whoosh!
bloody upon a beach of tangled bed-sheets, a ragged howl
rips through the tiny two-story house on Clinton Avenue.
“hell-o! hell-o!”, they are mouthing. but these glad
words are lost on the tiny red-faced visitor.
II
thus a plan begins early, immediately,
in those initial chaotic moments of embodiment,
a blistering assessment reveals there was no consultation,
no one asked her opinion, no one inquired about her readiness,
her inclination to go another round, to shoulder this wild
load of mortality, again. ’til death do us part, married to
a skin-bag full of organs, blood and bones… again.
III
witness, during those first years,
edges are always torn and smoking,
cut with rusted pinking shears, a constant
primitive recapitulation of the original wound.
back behind the shed, crayon scrawled on a crude altar,
the mother reads: Houdini, Icarus – did you die for my sins?
and she shakes her head, knits her brow, wraps her arms
more tightly around her thin and aproned body,
shivering in the weak spring sunlight, she
shuffles through fresh mown grass,
back to an empty house.
IV
genius and madness constantly
snake the girl’s boundaries, rustling
through the days, the months, the decades
of this vivid incarnation, threatening the uneasy
equilibrium, the shaky, delicate truce
that threads body mind and soul.
and though it takes time,
once the Longing awakens, yawns,
stretches, and tears through the soiled swaddling cloth,
its powerful thrum demands reckoning: to be tuned, to be calibrated
then to be fed at all hours for this hunger is irascible, insatiable,
voracious. and this hunger brooks no deferment.
what’s revealed in the peeling is a rage to rise,
to elevate, to unemcumber. to release the exhausted burden
of this sorrowful earth. to kiss gravity one more time – seductive, enigmatic,
claustrophobic, possessive, domineering. but the girl, now a woman,
won’t be owned so finds a way to say goodbye.
V
the monkey ropes, the jumping roofs,
the props, the rehearsals, the endless secret
purple bruises that mystified the ones around her.
so long in the study of Up, inspired by the great teachers:
majestic herons, persistent king fishers, pelicans,
osprey, sea eagles. the wisdom in a feather,
irresistible, effortless, the mystery of lift
alive in a single hollow shaft.
VI
what remained was the knapsack, nothing more.
searchers persisted for weeks, on foot, in cars, by helicopter.
and the mother still wanders in the pine woods beneath the cliff,
hair, grayed and luminous in the moonlight, singing a song
her daughter loved about a hummingbird who married
a peacock and how they gave birth to a dragonfly.
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