Hiraeth (four poems)

Whale

I wish I had been
a child then

long, slender
circular years
peeled years
sloshing around
in the fluids of my thinking

I began suddenly
with fine oils and salts
stooped delicately
to receive
a small thumbnail of earth

rind of the outer eyes
water of the knees.

I was there
in a dense market
I was born
already grown
shaded and perceptible

a reel of memory
going long
slender and circular
in the dull theater of my thinking.

I sold what I had.
I felt lonely and it passed.
I saw a grey whale coming to shore
near the market

my mother, both land and sea
oils and salt water
she reckoned she would lie on the beach and die.

I knew:
she was my house
she had children
a hidden poison was there
I was a child.

---

Any Room

None of this happened:

A young person as raw as
a publicly subsidized building
where people work

yes, it was life
there used to be experiences
and memory

my voice caught in thinking

on this planet
is my mouth not what I picked?

Quite dark
but even more so
a performance

I don’t know how please tell me how.
I wept for hours.

I believe the most important part
of any room
is the last person I talked to

and the idea that it would be boyhood
in the sense that
you could see the years going on

a little sign
suspicion at enjoying people
abrasive love

I stand up and applaud
at the last second.

---

In Time

With things: the two realities
that dissonance was God

caught, not like suffering
but like the crease in the cushion

here I am with all these men
with faces.

The center, we know,
tried to chain my throat

just like the thud of lost purpose
experience is the center

and there is some dark energy
this time

             I felt I could see it

yet I am thinking
the exact same way.

This is the gift: coming
into un-success and then being,

espousing a long marriage
with a field

she is wise
and you’re exact

the undefined space
chasing some great something

something on the edge
you can recognize.

I went to bed that night
thinking of my life

I was on this boat
closing my eyes indisputably

and waking up to pictures, pale
and then you

so healthy and morally right.

I am presenting a form,
and it was out of place like this for years.

After, I’d ask,
is it a good thing to feel good?

How much do I want? Is it a virtue
to have so many thoughts?

When you think about
the vapidness of living

in Time give this:
give your artistry.

---

Lens

Growing in people
those seeing Jerusalem
the Sun lost as she was passing

a music that
struggled as different backgrounds
without sound

and I felt at home in that moment.

The script we developed
was made at the height of the
cut in the world

so many of us
understanding our story
carrying it intensely without identity

the mirror the mirror
without giving anything away
I can’t speak

and other people can quickly lead you
to hauntedness
or a beautiful question.

I don’t think from the lens of love
now here and between

love

and for the other:
the word, the gift
the gift

here, a gift
our isolation
came less from life

and imagine what it is,
the onslaught of relief
the ability to go on without power

but I think to be alive now
the air smells like matter

or like light.

Editor’s Note: For reflections on this work, see Brian George’s accompanying piece, “On the Poems of Lauren Rhiannon Lockhart.”