Joshua Kryah
from Holy Ghost People

1

My voice once a city,
a people.

                 Now flames, glass shattering,
            the huddled and hurrying away—

                                                                                 let us go down
                                                   and there confound their language, that they may not
                                  understand one another’s speech—

                                                                      The whole language of me halved,
                                                               then halved again until

                         no word adheres, no
                 amount of thrashing, convulsing

                                              can make the body bring it

                                                                                     (o word, o home)
                              back.

 

2

Speaking resides outside

           the body.
                                That radius, that radial
                            from which the voice,

                                                              as if on horseback
                                           rides from the burning city into

                                                                          its surrounding forest,
                                                              a warning, an alarm,

                                                                          an encumbrance of what’s to come—

                                                       “I told the spirits I didn’t
                                                 want to”—

                      Such admittance
           is rupture, sundering,

                                                       an estrangement from self
                           I couldn’t know I had a part—

                                                                                     “they came upon me”—

      And come and come.

 

3

                 Oddly endless, your word,
my part in it, how neither of us

                                speaks

                                               without the other.

                                                                What language promises: that something
                                 will be said or someone will listen.

                                                                                                   Am I your keeper then, your
                                                                                            steward?

                                            What fetches up is tumult, clamor,
                      that which refuses to be hushed,

                                                                                        the throat’s beehive,
                                                                             its birdcage.

Fouled, our speech is.

                                            And regrettable
              for not having said enough.

                                                                             Or too much.

                                                                                       (once the colony is overgorged)

                                            Or never again.

           (once the finch has bloodied
its already red breast)

 

4

     How to speak to one another, how
to listen.

                      There, in the thicket,
                  the mocking bird takes on, like a twin,

                                                  the sound of what surrounds it—

                                                                                                   thicket, thicket, thicket—

                                   To say and to hide behind
                      the saying. This gift,

                                                                  what your visiting bestows.

                                                                                     In the thick brush, my voice,
                                              unrecognizable, thrown back at me.

                                 What I am
                      in search of, what I no longer

           (depth after depth) fathom, but am
in, your—

                    thicket, thicket, thicket—

 

5

    Inside the gourd a locution
stirs.

                  That which I abandon, you abound in—

                                            like unto white sepulchres—

                                 Begin with ordinary speech, then become
                      dark rags and bones, empty shade.

                                                                  So much noise, your script
                                                   now bespoke, made lingual.

                                                                             But for how long—

                                                                                        it smote the gourd that it withered—

                                            One has no other
                                 than one’s own self to afflict.

                      I speak of marauding, wrecking
           the body

                              so it might speak
       its bodiless message.

 

6

Silence,
              every throat’s
sovereignty.

                          But what to do
                  with these pale and bewildered

                                            utterances—

                                                                      for I am a man
                                                              of unclean lips, and I dwell
                                                                                              in the midst of a people
                                                                                        of unclean lips—

                                                       They affirm all things, they deny
                                       all things, they confound and confuse

                  and make tolerable and too much
                                 to bear

                                                       all things.

                                                                             They, you, this disturbance
                                 in which all other disturbances cease.

                           I thought to cry, but you
           were just that: this heaving,

                                                                  mouthful after mouthful
                                                       from me,

                                                                             your good word.