in response to my first poem

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POEM FOR MOBILE (BELOW)

I

The wind sprang at four o'clock.

The chorus, in gray, dots a spring
with the fresh liveliness of growth.
Sudden, 
	sunken, is now that lipped light
— a wish
for a warmth
yet unexplored.

To look back is also that.

You'd see things only
as they moved. Elements
with immense breadth
precipitated idiocy and honesty
     as differing 
	only then.

You were never known
for the subtlety of your oppression.

II 

You’d listen — quietly — for Silve-
strov. He, quieter still. Stille Musik had 
another density entirely. You’d mistake it
for death, and the science of such. An
oceanic monstrosity, an ague of
a many-eyed god or godthing. Not
the convivial beingness
which life consigns to mythology. 

‘cognition persists’, you’d write,
‘above and below itself’, and sleep,
‘the music of languid fields’, and night,
an incubating interiority which unfolds
as sleep, and so inward, when inwardness
was burning tinsel; the ballast of
an immovable sea. 

That, and every-
thing else,
you’d welcome. 

Suffering — among many other things —
is the measure of that which feels. You
will fight much yet
with that sublimating dimension.

You will be brought many more times yet
to the portal of your own tribunal, and
as a spate of you articulates 
    what can only be described as trauma
through a desolate assay,
  your hands, still lucid, will scutter
in anticipation of mourning. 

You will be brought many more times yet
to the dawn of abuse; bear the friction
of bending your bones to the performance
of this perpetual shock; even 
shock of shock. You will inflect
as every discovery of selfness
points to the cruelty
of your design. 

You will cry, and
as it did then,
it will feel the least
like effective crying. 

Stille Musik, he called it,
to look back is also that. 

III

you emerged, at a deep-set evening, as mockery. 
all of you mirrored, heterotopic, the tame and frail 
understanding 
of words and
wordship. 

you were, in your lostness, for whom the bell tolled,
and the stress of your temporality settled in your forehead
as a sign of capture
and a sign of servitude

and when
 the skysoaked dusk, transfigured as if punched
    by a horde of grieving men, sprang upon you,
then, you got the taste
of your pet terror. 

you wrote, as lightly as one may,
‘you shall ask for your place
in all of this, and you will learn only
to give yourself up.’

you will be eroded; you will feel
the silent spring of your consumption,
because to look back is also that.