The Mongrel

There was no name for us in our mother’s oratory.
– Saint-John Perse

?

Still unravelling from ghosting stars,
she moves us, light-formed, cue,
of Mongrel, also a corpse, but of steel,
curved, down earth’s scrubbed sands,
on a single gust of wind,
and her body through a doorway,
she shrinks hundredfold,
to size of Earth: moments ago, forgotten,
now dreamt Mongrel: a fur city, no more
archival than ancient than still warm and
she’d done nothing except bawl
the lost,
are enough! The science, inexact like birth
is Mother, Mongrel alive in the street-chained light –

=

If from above, the Mongrel’s Creole maps
mathless, a late-life scar that carts its wounded
head on the surface of a jaundiced stream, she – feral
with remembrance, her black-rock heart must hide
pressure-cooked islands, stormed space where
Einstein’s quadrate bones scurry to mount Nèg maron.
Slave-hand revolts at the green mouth of Hades:
how Mongrel rites wrap fur against a Native
is address to Caliban, the animal that knew it had been
brutalized by men. But fine. By now, the seas are vague,
and even the exploded Carina spares us, wanderlust
and relative need for lightspeed, systems and fall-off –

?

There is blood, seldom ache, where the avail-
able light reaches down past levels of dog,
cow’s grass, tribe, pitch and burn, the wild
brutality loves us this side of the name, while
only misted, our ears stretch to still the Mongreled
air landing, broken, invented again as
history
in the rusted coils of coffee shops, inked
Mongrel skins, whose only escape is one cosmic
blue carbuncle. What is the right way to sway
the Black bruising self, elegant as a question
mark can curve into harp and vein and matter,
dark with blows like from God, cannibal and castoff –

?

The Mongrel was still breaking, offing,
in a pale blue nutshell of monk’s milk and tar
when life exposed the carapace of her skull.
Bit, where ancestors drew their roots up
those walls of knotted blood, on a throne
that names a million years into entering an illusion
of singed bamboo, then ships
come and night comes and stays and soon
these generations miss their gills, scales
and talons, still dug into old valleys, still
lulled by disappearing suns, by broke hours
of bone branding flesh, held dark through
immortal dark, a gleam of that riverine name –

?

Inside the wounded name, she gathers like dust
down the corduroy route, the Mongrel
heart in her hand – once part of a waist-high
Earth, then life upward started with the trees and
untroubled by the termites, still one hundred
million years off and withered on the brow of chance.
Together, they disappear to plot with the cliffs
from which will protrude pavement
and aperture, time: a Mongrel’s walk to the place of these pines.
Collapse, then, into leather boot and this smoked hunger and re-enter
the story: that Nova Scotia beach aglow with Mongrel flame –

?

Now if she knew to sit, downed by the blunt breath
of doubt, would she have troubled the Mongrel
with music and milk and names and trenches,
those miles so deep? What else reveals us, a species
of amnesiacs, cut off from the trembling that tore –
our continents apart? And with so much unknowing
like this view, like rising smoke reveals the Eden
continent, preserved in the blind spot of a pictured
confession: this grief, a story with swords and bite, sun
whose silence holds the invisible pulls of distant worlds, wars
unhinged from the shoulder blades of gods. The Mongrel’s
orienting grace is still its tail, showing up for things to come,
signalling that our knowledge of the Mongrel is only fragmentary –