Saturday, March 7, 2009

A Response to Atwood's Siren*

I have heard your call before
in the chill fog
beneath the cloaked stars
my thoughts slowly turn to ice.

I have drowned
in your winter seas
with summer in my ears
I have been picked clean
by devouring mythologies
personified by the hungers
of tangible flesh

I am merely a ghost
and you will crack your maw
on my bones.
I will haunt your island;
a lusty, phantasmagoric nation feasting
on its Odyssean immigrants
a nation rushing towards
abyss and night
towards murder and revenge
towards death and the infinite

I am equally disappointed
by the boredom of desire and ego

Boredom, desire, ego
the nagging urgency
of forever unfulfilled bodies

The boredom of mortality,
bodies aching incessantly to drain themselves
into bottomless vessels
bottomless vessels longing to be filled
a finite world
constantly tipping its balances

As a ghost
I can only imitate the living
but my heart can transpose life
into dreams
where I prefer to wander

Dreams:
where I can listen
to the songs of sirens
like the rustling of leaves
Dreams:
where I can passively watch
myself destroyed,
infinitely alive as well as dead.

In my dreams
there are no islands.
(there are titanic worlds drifting)

In my dreams sometimes
you drift through me
(because I am a ghost)
and there is a shimmer
in the tangible world

the tangible world
which eats itself and procreates
and therefore dies and grows
eternally.

In the shimmers there is
infinity.

Infinity
where words melt

Infinity
where stars collapse
and are born

Infinity
shimmers
in a siren's
distant subtle almost smiling
oceanic sunny icicle eyes
searching
singing
and I think
sometimes
dreaming

*Siren Song by Margaret Atwood

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