MY SON CONJURES lost images through me. I can't deliberately take it back to the beginning. There's something earlier, something prior to that even, hiding in the cells, ready to leap out with sudden surprising intensity. There's a region of grass and pill bugs, and of black uncertain movements. A place in me that lacks definition, the shape or contour of definite things. Chronos resides there too, raven on his shoulder, swinging a scythe. The other evening about dark I was overcome by a black mood. There wasn't anything to say about it. Orange light filtered through purple edges of the sky in elm branches and their newly acquired spring nodes—the little buds, those dear green beginnings. And the mood shifted as suddenly as it had come on. I recalled a native destructiveness. Like I carried some early, pre-conscious crime. There's something about the parents. We beat them down into us, eat their force and image, becoming such an outer growth of their death in us. They aren't recognized as such, but get absorbed into the organs and muscle. It's their blood on the black stone. And before that it's even weirder.
Posted by Dale at April 29, 2004 04:23 PM