No one knows where the winter food
is coming from. My icons and their
night light set in a recognizable
island are so paralyzingly holy
they lack the reality of reality
as our green wallpaper coloured
with arsenic of copper has adopted
some ideal white, so sweet and conscious.
A forever Marybud of which I am less sure,
in my servility to dominant interests,
text-worker, state writer, sapiential
woman with my quasi-brand name
lending my voice to others’ words
like Ovid’s Echo, who can repeat,
but not originate, speech, the depth
of dark beneath which lies our day.
I had been living so far from words
in my former wordlessness that to speak
often seems a kind of police work,
ventriloquizing the words of another.
I had been mapping the world for so long
through Hiberno-English, a hair’s breadth
departure from a crust of dead English
to the unsayable void of the Portadownians.
A silent receptacle of many echoes
so overrun, and skimmed for the scant
cream of sense, or any sediment present
to my own available vocabulary
being spoken through, damozen, lap summer
skirt, rendered blue in the face
by the sonnet form, that liberates
the thousand river names from their anchorage.
I bescribble and I blacken paper
with my smooth domesticated tissue
of images desiring to please a shadow,
to saddle with meanings the traumas of war
by an occasion of wordshed.
Language deserts the self
like the fragility of the outer meaning
playing on the joy in Joyce.
A pillow of old words with old
credentials, never certain that their
passports are quite in order,
nothing with which to express,
nothing from which, no power,
no desire, with the obligation
to find semantic succour, and no
audience—that’s part of one’s death.