SALVAGE

(NEW POEM)

that the term salvage – obsolete for savage – is a derivative of sylva, latin for wood.

that the old english term wōd means furious or rabid. that from this, the middle english term wodnes is obsolete for madness or rage.

that desire is guided by loss: you do not desire what you already have. but this desire is cavernous. our loss is foundational and all-encompassing, down among the bent backs and black potatoes. it is exile that sticks to us like second nature. a kern, queerly. scorned among the trees. green cerements of shelter. green architects of ambush. spring is a blackbird, its sojourning melody out of bounds. the trees, their fractious thrust and fell. desire too, is touched by decline. the axe, conspicuous salute. the scythe, its bare usurper’s swath.

it is lent. we must relearn desire: not something to be filled or acquitted of. instead, a way towards. it is not the wanting that is wrong. it is not wrong to want. but not to tolerate that wanting, to rush to cover wanting always. this is the mistake. fear is not the same as need. i too must learn, to stay inside desire – to stray inside desire – to say that while desire is indeed guided by loss, desire itself is not an absence underfoot. nor yet an obstruction, confounding the path. desire as path. more accurately, desire as forest. desire excites, evades, rewards like errancy. or else it strands. yes, that desire is anchor and beacon. but also: minotaur, seething at the centre of the maze. also: the maze, its deadend headfuck replications.

that our first grief was trees and trees. how we became accustomed to impossible desire, desire without end, that we summoned the absent forest inside of language: blackthorn’s windbreak, dark flank of trees, their forage and affray. doire, cill dara, an iúr, and the ford mouth bright with birch. to live inside the forest that keeps the haunted mouth from closing. woe’s roost here. compelled, opaque. to be scoured in and clad by the same weather. enclosed inside of temperament, a broken truce of trees. the forest is my frenzy and my sacrament. when i think of you, the hawthorn’s wild asylum. is growing through this bruised sufficiency of form.