Joshua Kryah
Your body is not.
But once bodied
it suffered the same weight and hunger and humiliation.
Your throat rose to redden the day
and we moistened your lips
to keep the redness
from leaving.
Now something has happened to your throat.
~
No body, no day.
No god
breaking down inside you once your body went
the way of all bodies and days.
A beast dies and does not know
its name.
So we named you.
~
immortall Rose
eternall Flower
In whose absence we are but do not know it.
An ox weeping
at the sight of its departed yoke-mate.
Incredulous or bridled, speechless
or unable to apprehend or console or
free itself.
The wrenching apart, the wrested.
~
Without struggle.
Without complaint.
However offered–
your body, its leavetaking–it resembles still
our own.
To be hauled away, our arms flung around
the neck of a dying animal.
How you left us.
Your timorous beasts.
On the Body and Ablaze
Fetch smoke.
The sky is
hung
with sulfur and ash. Above us
so many orphaned shadows.
They could belong to no one,
to everyone. There are so many
parts to the body.
~
In the meadow
each thing
burns, a miniature apocalypse, feverish
even in daylight–
and these signs will accompany
those who believe–
That ardor.
That incendiary.
~
By which to attend, to
witness.
Not the same as to burn
but to burn others.
This meadow, the sky a hideous bloom, all
the parched birds who take flight
from the smoke in their wings–
swallow, swallow, swallow—
~
We are made
and then
undone, the broken stirrings
of small wings and voices,
their delicate architecture
of bone and petal,
petal and bone.
That deft.
That tearing.
But we do not
know it,
~
we do not recognize
it–
The fire, the animal caught within
its approach, my lost name.
Consumed in it, pronounced
by it, what can I belong to
other than what has already
spoken?
~
These breakages,
the remarkable openness
they lay bare.
The indiscriminating blackening
of everything remaining, everything
no longer there–
these signs—
The fleece stained, the animal
charred
and now a part of it
forever.
~
If you should ask
how I found
the beloved–
(there was, there was)
so much hurling myself
away from, so much
hurling myself–strayed, unrecoverable,
through the slowly, slowly,
silting down air–
back.
Daysounds.
A red
breaking down. And then dawn.
The sparrow lying in the field
for over a week now,
breaking,
broken.
~
What this means–
loss
or a lostness.
Coming upon it
during
our morning walk. Such harrowing
and hurt. Such a small asking.
What is it for?
~
The child holds it.
Her hands
an alter, the bird
a failure of flight, of persuasion,
of whatever might lift us
beyond this
between.
~
Knowing it failed,
we become
wingless, that much nearer
to what it means to be living.
Through which all things pass.
Through which you
and you
Joshua Kryah is the author of Glean (2007). A former Schaeffer Fellow in poetry, he teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“The mustaches Joshua drew with his mother’s lipstick still adorn his childhood front porch in St. Louis, Missouri. It was here he spent endless hours awaiting release from his captors during neighborhood jailbreak. Thus the mustaches.”