ATHENA
What’s deemed necessary
changes. Hear
me
listening in another
decade, editing
last
and first lines.
A different
Singer
croons from behind
an impassive
speaker.
I listen, cross
out more
lines.
The poem cannot
be pure.
Sound
never travels unimpeded
by anonymous
butterflies.
Writing it down
merely freezes
flight—
Translation: an inevitable
fall. Take
control
by shooting it
as if
pigeons
were clay: This
one is.
But
It provided pleasure
once, was
“necessary.”
Once, it flew
with non-imaginary
wings.
O, clay pigeon.
Translation: the
error
is my ear’s.
The sky
ruptured
suddenly—I saw
but did
not
hear the precursor
fall of
leaves.
*****
Edit it down.
Edit it
down.
Silence is Queen,
not lady
-in-waiting.
Edit it down.
Edit it.
Edit
it down. Edit
it. Edit.
Edit.
—Eileen Tabios
_____
From DREDGING FOR ATLANTIS (Otoliths, 2006)
SENTENCES
The same sky imaging your eyes folded over me as a perfume’s memory of “wine, pearls and stone” when I received your dream marveling I’ve become “a footnote grown larger than the book.”
The same book you read to excavate me is a fiction I sculpted to soften my marble core, as if—and I still don’t know—words can save me from myself.
The same poem you are feeling your way through is a thin, blue vein dug out from beneath my flesh for the color of a sky breaking into scarlet to set words afire.
The same byline your fingers caress now is text on a page, “which is to say,” yet another tree was axed for you to find the Iron Gate behind which I long hid with uncut hair and wounds as eyes, waiting for You.
—Eileen Tabios
_____
First printed in Five Fingers Review and forthcoming in THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES (Marsh Hawk Press, Fall 2007)