passionate about studying volcanoes. They die[1]
Compelled by the untidy work of facing
something sacred in response to emptiness,
I myself, creating
the rumble. Before an eruption,
volcanoes experience increase
seismic activity as magma moves. Tremors
before the body gives. Women have
always known their holes, like volcano
she contains visibles and invisibles
side by side, strangeness by strangeness.
She is used to being told No. Negation functions
like magma–how the landscape never
returns to what it was before. My grandmother
probably will pass beneath branches of birch.
As her body decomposes she will stain
the whiteness of that Other ancestor
with the blood that seeps out her womb
monthly—dyed with wet flowers of blooming.
Geryon’s mother was this same
Red Joy river. His father was gold.
I spent a long time last night wondering
why Geryon never speaks
about abba, only thinking
about what is deposited into him—
what his box receives. Our father
need not art in heaven when he might
headbutt his name into molten form.
Please put Plato’s cave out of your mind.
Ask; What good is gold without poetry?
Our father might as well art metaphorically.
The volcano does not wait
for fertilization, does not need an Other.
Volcano listens. To the shifting plates beneath
their feet, to the moon’s distant whisper tugging
at the tides, to the weight of time pressing
against their ribs. They are not untouched. Volcano splits
open and spills forth, uncoiling
their body into rivers of aureate birth.
They are never truly alone.
Its terrifying. Anything is possible.
Footnotes:
[1] This poem contains six found lines. A couple I plucked from Economy of the Unlost and Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. All lines in italics are from the poem Hold by Cauleen Smith, found within her work titled Volcano Manifesto.
