The Marbled Sigh

If to Besing Life is to Besing Death

I want to tell others how afraid I am, but I don’t think that they would understand.
            Yes, in the end everything will die. When I was younger, I lived my life afraid of death. There was the dying itself, how it would swoop down peregrine-swift when least expected, at that moment where circumstances finally allowed you a moment of whatever you most sought –happiness, peace, redemption, freedom from the many cages built for and by us. Whatever you sought that would allow you to finally answer, no matter how tentatively, yes to the fundamental question of existence: that there was somewhere within you, or perhaps out there in the large and fearsome world, some thing that tipped the scales in favor of living. Then there was the horror of you no longer being, no longer feeling at all, the world retaining no permanent memory of your ever having been, the futility of it all, the terrible silence after the strike of those heavy, black wings.

               I want to tell others how afraid I am but I don’t think that they would understand.
               Now, at last, I can accept the truth of it, at least in words: yes, in the end everything will die. Even if the poles were not melting, eventually the sun would expand to consume us. Or in another 5 billion years, our galaxy and Andromeda would collide, merging to form an entity larger than themselves out of destruction impossible for even us to imagine.

               Now, at last, I understand the precariousness of existence. How impossible life is. How everything wavers between being and non-being at every moment in time. How we are all cradled on the thinnest of threads between those two polarities. How scientists tell us gravity is weak, much weaker than their calculations would predict. Yet have they seen the world? Have they gone out into it and witnessed that which alone holds everything together? How do they not see that gravity is love? How everything desired itself into becoming because there was no other way? How even ice is needful, hungry for warmth and light? How life feeds on life, consuming itself in endless cycle? Is that not love?

               Only massive bodies, fire embodied, can bear the fullness of gravity. Gravity, which is love. Gravity, called weak.

               How the wolf desires the lamb, the lamb the pliant grass, the pliant grass the light of sun and black of earth, the sunlight and earthlight but bodies in perpetual pull and struggle, following their orbits, desiring themselves, desiring each other, blind not in unconsciousness but in the fever of need. Even the agnostic must concede the sheer improbability of this world existing against the pull of entropy. How the heart beats in everything, so eloquent and knowing, so foolish and unlikely. I used to fear the universe might end in ice – unending expansion until the last starfire has consumed itself to cold and dark.

               Now I fear to imagine how it would end in fire, contracting upon itself in the fullness of want until it collapses to the nothing that birthed everything.

               Gravity, which they call weak. Gravity, which is love which is desire.

I want to tell you how afraid I am, but I don’t think that you would understand.

Kindred

Katabasis

Stop. Sit here. Dwell in stillbirth. On the threshold of becoming. Pay silence her
due. Speak her in tongue forged of iron and crushed sea glass: what the sea once
mended broken again broken again broken. The space where the snake coils and
uncoils. Toil day and night to reclaim a home from the boneyard of deep-sown
lies giving birth to what, to your eyes, are rectilinear monstrosities distorting
history and confounding geographies.

Linger the surface of the waters. Breathe space connect: white oaks obsidian cars
citrine bricks layered in edifice after edifice beyond the surface separation.
Buildings bloom orange in the light of the dying sun, bandaged in his mummy
wrappings to be reborn tomorrow. Inside, the light of that sun upon my walls
engenders an ocean through which opalescent fish swim into crevices to disappear
into the dark worlds abutting this one. Warm flashes of light behind eyelids tattoo
themselves into the shape of leaves fanning into obscure constellations that only
my eyes, two coruscating dervishes, have discerned since the great desert last
receded. The closest you will ever come to god is the being of a fish in the sea not
knowing the wetness of water.

Don’t awaken me until the acacia and ash and the fiery waters have conquered
this pyrite city spreading its tentacled influence beyond all boundaries, even unto
the graveyards of those who dream beneath the waves of the Atlantic. I have
heard of watery exoplanets a hundred miles or more in depth; but there exists a
pool at the intersection of fourteen roads where I have swum twice that depth and
not touched Earth. At this crossroads the indigo dyers gather at dusk to etch vévés
into the skin of living iroko trees. But know that this exercise in circumlocution is
not for want of words. This is for excess of language: the screech of the red-tailed
hawk, the laughter of the hyena – hear how eloquently they discourse on the
revolutions of our sun around Sothis.

Have you experienced the sun within? Strange lotuses and spatiotemporal
relocations that hide what they reveal playing sleight-of-hand with your spotted
eyes. Prior dislocation bursting forth into the rhythm of a river flowing south to
north, rendering right west and left east. Sudden seed pods emerge from the mere
in winter’s midst. Still, as the world spins, the well-honed liars spin savagery into
myths of civilization. Spin the equinoctial precession into myths of western
supremacy. We are dying slowly every day. Cortices of silver-skinned beeches.
Cut by cut. Incision by fine incision, the blood of life seeps out, invisible. They
are incapable of feeling. How shallow an indictment, when every closed eyelid is
porous to sunlight and rain falling on Earth. When the scarab rolls its miniature
sun by the shadows the star-formations above cast. When everything that is, is
self-eloquent.

The Origins of Fire

I. The Language of Birds

At end of day,
you and I stay
to gather ourselves
on the threshold.

You are not
there.
I am not
here.

We have crossed
enemy waters
to this place
of equinoctial poise,

spine bent beneath
the weight of our dead
until we dissolve to
nothing

and the dead speak
through us, however
unwilling our tongue,
captive, fed on sugared

milk, gentle lies – but still
beneath the clamor
the wings beat, the bird
refuses death still.

II. Nazareth

Fragments of noonday sun:

running in rain sky over La Habana
steps slip muddy impress of centuries

turn a corner to the Nazarene shrine
of the unnamed mother blue tile eyes occlude

what her smile hints grandmother’s rocking
chair legs dangle down beyond El Malecon

beneath despoiled seas to the center of things
unraveling unraveling faces replaced by wooden masks

such as the one the world will wear at the final
setting of a sun relieved to never again have to rise.

hopscotch and jump rope the language of the older girls
a cipher I wanted in but would not understand

until I had crossed the sea northward. blackout

again neighbors chatting on the veranda
of the ruins of empire cathedrals of trees

melancholy in memory only the sound of a violin
sheets of water sheets of water falling water water

lisping over stone bone fragments of bone we wield
scalpel forceps caul to mend our broken altars
to a god unknown.

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Issis Palomo Sánchez is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing (Poetry) of the City College of New York. Currently residing in mythic Ithaca (upstate New York, which she would argue feels as haunted and eldritch as Odysseus’ home), she immigrated with her family from the equally fabled Havana, Cuba at a young age. Her favorite poets are Audre Lorde and William Blake.