Illustrating the Illustrators
[See
Plate 123, Fig. 46-47]
When
we wrote the name that we were told
was ours, the name that contained all
we would be given and all that would be lost,
there was a pleasure in the small, exact
movements of our hands, the pencil a machine,
worshipped, and that
was where it began.
We said Let us be children together,
and we drew our lives before the body.
We drew the coal-quay whores with wooden legs,
the tow-horses asleep against the fog. Even dusk
flooded a whole new darkness, a sympathetic
ink.
We said If death is like this then give us more.
From Illustrating
the 13 transits of Mercury in the 19th century
Mercury asleep against a blue-ribbon goat
And everyone a witness of the buried years, of
the
animal’s flesh, all animals the living island,
the
only ones under the trees. Our ancestor with
the
crippled wrist gave us light, and our goat ate
clover
softest from the hand.
Mercury
asleep with the whippoorwill
The
living darknesses of nests in the garden,
snake-paths
through the straw, I know in myself
that
call, dense where the landscapes line
themselves
up, emerging throughout the weeds.
Where
the ghost lamb stood, night came from
the
ground.
Mercury asleep
in the retreat of lost armies
The clear water that appeared in craters after the
cannons fell, after the enemy said I’ve never seen
snow before, froze, and we drank nothing.
Through the ice, we could see black fish
mouthing
at us, so we cut holes for them to visit,
took them
for our wives. This is a new world, we
said.
Farewell to the other.
Mercury
asleep again on the illustration of the metal tongue
[See Plate 19, Fig. 95]
There are geese in the sky tonight, alone in their
snow. I can hear their metal tongues, calling to
that unknown season, over the houses, the
harvested streets. In the innumerable world, in
the brave ghost kingdom, there are many ways
to
live, and this is one of them.
-from Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World
Listen to Joshua Poteat read his work here
