Element
By Atsuro Riley
— Way on back through the underwood by Bowen’s Canal
Well we’d heard it to be veiny with cottonmouths I’m not gonna lie.
•
For true
the sheer (snake-electric) back-beyond of the place
put a pull on us like a magnet.
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That that rag-rope (flagged and) barred the path just egged us on.
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(To go and
skulk- and sidle-learn
to palp and tap the edge
to crack us in.)
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— What’d we feel there once we’d crossed?
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Veritable
thought-thick trunks
of swampfoot oaks.
•
Something like ‘a shift in the structure of experience.’
•
Here was
Johnny Pep (shrapped home from war)
branch-dragging
agglomerating discards and disjecta.
•
His craving wove a plexus (more a house) from limbs and leaves.
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He knit us in:
he left us be. He let us watch he watched us try
(to climb to ape his crisscross weave)
to pitch to plait the roof.
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Something like ‘Yall strayboys welcome to be welcome if you work.’
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Didn’t we ‘work’ —
particular night-hoots (and near-chromatic whistle-riffs) in echo; likenesses
he whittled live from hickory showed us how.
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He’d let us
watch him strip and shave
the shagbark bark
to taste (to read) to mull the grain.
•
Something like ‘root-room’ I reckon. Something like
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‘When Johnny Pep hitched home from war
we took to carving (curing) scraplings into shapes.’
Notes:
This is the first published version of the poem, as it appeared in Poetry magazine in 2018. The poem has since been significantly revised; the revised definitive version can be found in Atsuro Riley's collection Heard-Hoard (2021).
Source: Poetry (September 2017)