Visitation                                                                                                                  

or: The Ancestors Finally Reject Our Childish Pleas for Clemency

In the end, our failure to raise a visitation

became intolerable. Face down in the muddle,

we rummaged the shallows at the furthest lip

of what could still be called land.

Snaking through confused bottom weeds,

we twisted a root from the recalcitrant muck.

Then raised our heads to the mute blow

of a daylight that refused to diminish its sum

for our sake.

Fever-blind, we sped headlong

to haphazard shards of hope

whirling out our dazed, mute esophagus,

begging the waters to the stingy brine

of our misbegotten thirst, as if

the stony ecstasy of silent rock might leach

and bare its fugitive fossil,

which might dare speak

given that words might have bones,

sovereign locomotion, power of direction—

                        headlong into blank astringent fact,

                        the tincture we tasted by night—

where last we went together

mining ice for fossil memory,

and watched its rime burn away

beneath dawn-rise,

in whose heat we hid the weeping sun

revolving in our belly,

awaiting birth into a sky,

any sky—

any sky at all.

rabbitandrose.com, literary blog of Kim Shuck,

San Francisco Poet Laureate Emerita, issue 3, 2007

11/9: The Fall of American Democracy, 2017