Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth
BLAKE
Knowledge alone is no more than a weariness of the soul
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Always this pressing for shape –
paddlewheel, gear’s tooth, millstone,
wood driven on water, the force
pushing through iron to stone and the stones
grinding to quiet the shudder of wheatfields.
Centuries of grain, centuries of water,
galaxies of dust mottling the sunlight
sheened their working flesh, dust
in the eyelid, chaff in the shoes.
Somewhere are numbers and graphs
for the mountains of bread, the fat loaves
rising in ovens: knowledge of soils,
rainfall, knowledge of mills, beams, joints,
or the tensions of water – for the curious
threading their beads of fact, those magpies.
Leave that old weariness
knowing or not knowing, the earth’s water
is pressing out of shape, its denial gives
in its no the quick of renewal, a mere
gesture of water here and not here
like a going of air. I revolve doubt
around doubt in this certainty of things –
stone, metal, wood, the running grain
beaten to meal: show me a thin cook
or a poor baker, wherever I look
I might see only wheatfields, possibles
turning about without centre,
doubt at the axlehub driving the flour
into bread and the bread into sleek girls
measuring their waists in pale slices.
Crush the doubt under words, it
raises its ear, its signal for silence;
crush out the silence, it waits at the end
of our syllables, entered this mill
like an anthem. A quiet under sound,
the doubt back of certainties, there’s hunger
for bread and hunger apart from the bread.
Measureless absence, hunger is no word
it is nothing in the mouth
but struggling to say. On Famine Ridge
the bones count out loud: rib bone,
shut mouth, dead genital,
stone sounding on stone, throat whispering
eat eat in the sour fields,
charity’s ashes and lemonjuice, eat,
devour the earth. To the last crumb