Refrain
By Gina Franco
It would never be possible for a stone, no more than for an airplane, to elevate itself toward the sun in jubilation.
— Martin Heidegger
— Martin Heidegger
The dragonflies again; the last time seeing them
skim the river close
to forgotten — their singing,
their shimmer — now remembered, becoming so much
flame;
as tongues over the heads of the chosen in the child’s picture
book of Christ I learned by heart, descent and weight of after
the fact, the gift
the fork
between hope and vanity, the river that eats
itself turned mirror broken into
light; the corpse
between the beloved’s good word
and the beloved
who having spoken was ever spoken
into being, lies, unspeaking, and as with any heaviness that lowers
then hovers, remains
inconceivable; so the letter given in stone, perfection
in fire;
love; all
love’s failures; the winged animal
drops to the earth and is there buried in a hole where it digs
in the grit like the blade
we left in the riverbed, adrift and cry-
shaped in the memory, both
that dim and that loud; though
no accosting why it
seems that way, everything ghost
of itself or everything made
of mythic proportion, the walker
sinking from the face of the waters, the dragon I
become when I talk to myself, what a belief
is, terrifying
and relentless; I’ve never been
able to tell the difference;
the brute and the apparition
in reflection speak at once — the rock and the rock’s light —
so that now the insect thrums
and it is surely
a kind of tenderness, an ODing in secret, turning into while turning
from the soul the animal raised
and devoured in dream; imagine,
the child’s wished-for surface gives and ripples up
to mouth
the perfect imprint, saying “aircraft” and there are aircraft, amen,
the walker is surrounded by flight on all sides;
the walker
walks without wings; see,
the recollection is flawless, turning wings of jewels;
the recollection is absolute, swallows whole;
echoes;
and the dragon feasts; and the dragon flies again;
Source: Poetry (April 2014)