To the Source
Take my hand: will you bring me to the source,
to the river’s mouth? If I rise with the river,
I’ll be flooded with cattails and runoff. If I run off
with you, do you know a place beyond the arm
of the state? It’s getting late. Lead me to the heart-
land or a body of water, to my earliest language
so we can pledge to soil, seed, and air,
indivisible in a sparrow’s first subsong.
What if all’s related: the quality of light,
the Superfund site, the lump in the breast,
the songbirds sighted too early in spring?
In the smog, the only sunrise that can be seen
stalls out on a TV screen. Perhaps somewhere else
somebody’s birthright is sunlight, but in this Big Gulp
country, my body’s an artifact of industry: a trial, a test.
PCBs in the bloodstream, exposure to mercury
and lead dioxins. My fertility’s uncertain,
and that wheeze you hear could be a symptom,
could be a prickle of grief.
It’s getting late and the garden’s flooded.
Its dredgings speak of sacrifice: broken teeth
of harrow, patented seeds and chrysanthemum—
engineered blue. When the time comes,
we can count on our kind to reroute the river upstream,
to remake whole cities rather than ourselves. It’s getting late,
and the heat’s unseasonable, but season,
which meant once a proper time, a sowing,
now means scrounging for another morsel
of land, an ice floe to rest on, or a gesture of hope—
a spell of rain or the essential play of bees
in a force field of strawberries. It’s getting late,
the Arctic’s burning, and you cannot coax methane
back under permafrost. The mush spits up seal-
skin boots, seeds and microbes,
mammoth bones and pathogens,
viruses that will follow the dotted lines of love.
How does this song go? Is it told in a whisper
with a crack in the voice?
If you tilt your ear to the earth, what do you hear?
It’s getting late, and the whales are singing a little flat:
so loud the acoustics of cracking icebergs,
they may be changing their pitch to be heard.
Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish (winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Virginia Konchan) of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023). Mother Octopus (co-winner of the Halcyon Prize) is forthcoming from Middle Creek Publishing and may be pre-ordered now. She teaches at the University of Albany-SUNY.
Read or listen to three poems by Sarah Giragosian previously appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Swagath Mohan, courtesy Pexels.
