Hearthwork II
April's Poems
Waymarker I
Sisna
Horses move swiftly as the cavalry devastates the enemy territory it sweeps through. This medieval military strategy was meant to exhaust the land of the enemy, so there was no circumstance where they could continue. Of course, the earth receives damage, but eventually like all things it will recover. “Sisna: Chevauchée” applies this to the interior life. “Sisna” opens in observation, and the speaker witnesses their endurance from outside it with the same remove that “recognition” named as the pity thing.
at least I can watch a fallen leaf fleeting finale
Arles is the horse beneath the speaker and it is the city at the edge of the Camargue where Van Gogh rented the Yellow House, a geography already freighted with creative labor and the cost of feeling too much. The grief’s beast is received by a listening ear (its gear heard from within the ride itself). The speaker along with Arles enjoys the freedom of a liberty that belongs to moving through loss than against it. Each return carries the weight of lessons learned: tethering, faltering, and the forced-open eye. The speaker keeps returning to the refrain as a rider returns to a familiar trail, asking each time: is this still true?
free as could be
we gallop and streamThe indented lines—“in line with its starry wheat,” “in line with its wicked sting,” “in line with its spirit wisp,” “in line with its welcome spring”—descend the page like way-markers on a road, as the terrain changes, the speaker aligns each slightly more hopeful than the last. The rider does not stop for them; they are disregarded to the peripheral. Yet they form an arc from the indifferent loveliness of nature, then pain and longing, into renewal. Grief sweats, skips, churns, wines and dines. The wrist seam trembles; the iris is called to irony. The emotion moves through tissue, sinew, the horse-body and the human body made briefly in motion. The rider is themselves, the horse, the hooves, and the skipped beat. Riding becomes a metaphor for any pursuit in which one cannot separate themselves from grief’s carriage.
each thought an image of wonder crimes each time a tied tithe where ponder cries at that stop, did we hear movement fear? the wind muscled the earth to drop
Crimes leave evidence, implicate a perpetrator, and belong to a record that persists after the act. Every act of wonder—thoughts that become images or feeling deeply—becomes self-incrimination. The speaker builds a case against themselves as looking becomes a kind of trespass. Each is a moment where the speaker's attention is commandeered by something external: the chevauchée that strips the land, the forced focus that holds the eye forward, and the irony moon that rises without permission. The speaker has accumulated evidence of their grief throughout the piece and “wonder crimes” names the cost. Tithe is the prior claim the earth or the divine has on what the speaker produces and tied is a bound and equal cost matched to the wonder. Each time the tithe comes due the speaker goes under to meet it. In “Flame Will Rise” the speaker stands at the threshold where water meets rock:
between the lefts—
roll onto hard jagged knew
between the rights—
dive under wet tithes' knewIn “Sisna,” the speaker chooses submersion over the alternative, which is to keep rolling over the jagged edge indefinitely. Ponder cries is a chosen submersion; the sound of someone facing what the gallop could have endlessly deferred. The question arrives in retrospect; fear traveled the road as sound, passing through unnamed while the gallop still held. The wind muscling the earth to drop is the external world confirming what the interior already knows. After all that churning (the bruise, the forced gaze, the wines and dines of grief), survival turns into the beautiful. One may say “good morning” and life flowers:
Good morning becomes the garden’s bloom. 
