Things Mortal and Immortal
"This Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death."
Landscape, with Ouroboros & Leviathan
there was that summer afternoon on which a brown snake
whispered its one long name : its single slow syllable :
across the toe of your boot : & in that one long moment
you felt the yellow grasses of a thousand summers rise
& fall : like the tides of an ancient shoreline : tugging
at your ankles : breaking around your boots in waves :
& the pattern of days & nights : across the seasons : across
the millennia : flickered : till the sky was a blurred grey
vespertine in which the sun & moon wore their grooves
of light : & in that moment, there before you, a eucalyptus
sapling staggered up out of the ebbing grasses : &
monstered up till it was menacing over you : then lived
its luminous moment : its century or two : before toppling :
& withering back into the tides of grasses from whence
it came : & when you looked again, the snake was gone
into its sibilance : & your feet were rooted deep into the clay :
(heartbeat)
(exhalation)
Thom SullivanNo Ordinary Necropolis I couldn’t countenance the trees. Each with its own small autumn on its back, Its death of a thousand leaves. All those false deaths and resurrections, Without grounding, without abyss. I wanted to swim in the broadest of lives, To luxuriate in real mortality. And when, little by little, man started denying me And closing doors so that my coursing hands Could not reach to wound and end him, I went then highway by highway, city by city, And street by street, and bed by bed, And, in my leviathan mask, traversed the desert Until, in the last lowly houses, Without lamp or fire, Without bread or millstone, Without even human silence, alone, I rolled to a halt and died my own death. I imagine bright tunics and brown hands. A trace of water in a sonorous basin. The smoothness of a wall once seen by a face with eyes like mine. A face that saw, with eyes like mine, the terrestrial lamps. The hands that oiled, like these hands of mine, the vanished timbers. All of it, robes and pots, wine and loaves, words and bodies, Is gone, fallen to earth. And the air itself sank Like the scent of lemon-blossom Into the slumbering citizens. Eternal air, tardy air, a keep-you-waiting air, Coming down like a blue wind off the iron cordillera. A tiptoeing hurricane come down To fumigate this lonely stone enclosure. translated by Aphrodite Haylock, and adapted by Sean Haylock, from Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Machu Picchu