Poem for Riperotten Summer
Artwork and poem by Micah McLeod-Harrison
Feel Like Feeling Like, ink on paper, 9 × 12 in
Poem for Riperotten Summer
i.
An error of scripted cross-marks,
hallucinated across empty waters:
and, there surrounding,
all the gaps, and all the valleys,
the furrows, the ditches, the ridges,
the gullies, the canyons,
and all of the marks on the land.
Low reaching low-hanging fruit
by a riverside…
We had walked out before dusk
to look to the far banks across the river
and see the things they had left,
to pretend that we hadn’t any meaning by the action
and were only looking out of curiosity.
(And there, looking on past the horizons
out from its sky now nearly purple,
the moon’s lime-wash crescent looked paler, paler still).
The black black silt of the riverbed
is forgetting its names in poisoned sleep of soil.
Text of the pages left
to the archives’ tenderness
must will their text white
to match the blackening of paper.
(The marks and the hands that made them).
See what now hangs then from ocher branches;
telephone cords finger-woven amid the boughs,
punch-cards slit through once again by bark-sharp edges,
empty manila folders tied with red string like withered fruit,
and the women with their eyes
blurred by silver halides come by...
Some of them, climbing the sentrytowers
to see the tombs like blade-sheaths
in the dull glare of the beacons by night.
By day
in the vast rot of leaves dimming full-down in-
to obscurity.
The lay of the land will be given the leave to lie lower:
so let she who sows
drink old words from the tongue of he who reaps.
ii.
From here I just dream this millionfold photograph of us.
Rolling and tumbling in great heaps
out along the empty highways
with the root-cracked tarmac.
Illuminated by a slivered ghost moon
that incises through black-cloying fog.
We glimpsed it from teetering patchwork towers’ windows then,
from towers built by the fallen and redeemed.
Our house was never the best or most honored,
but we paid back all the time we borrowed with surplus to spare.
And the milk-eyed ferryman sings to himself in his sleep,
with his boat tied to a meat-gray gnarl of root.
The view of a crooked tower from the hillside
that was stamped on this
tarnished bronze medallion is all we’ll have to pay our way.
But we’ll be together.
But we’ll be together.
Micah is an artist at North Pole Studio in Portland, OR
