Herm
by Jared Stanley
“Herm” was originally published in Issue 07 of Manor House Quarterly: MYTH.
We walked openly and for no reason
To form in the prowl of talk an owl’s head insignia —
That’s one way to say we took a walk
Or that rabbit brush dusted our sleeves
With pyramidal hints
With imitative and contagious music
Which gave these nights, in their broad coolness
A gift to come into, a
Bee sting on an Adam’s apple.
We loped to propose a question:
If the poem is an axis, what
Are the lines which cross it,
Its immersions, its alongsideness?
And I take upon me this speaking for both of us,
Confined as we are to the poem, its
Crossed figurations, its eye-encircled
Constellating, crossed and re-crossed by the paths and piths
Of Spy Novels, of Hot Wings,
Of little cuts of grease in the cuticles,
Of my coat, leaking feathers,
Of any decorative response.
I push one fingernail under the other,
And feel some pressure on my foot —
Either the sock is too big or the shoe is too small,
Knowledge outpacing the desire to know
Our walk’s aim, a creeping deliverance
A fresh set of tracks at angles, willy-nilly,
Parti-eyed to within an inch of home.
Genial squiggles turn inside the wit
Which animates such a walk
Its etymologies and hidden laws heaped up
In the thousandfold litter, or the lichens
Or tiny pebbles in a cairn; will they allow us
To well up in this unfurling,
This flag, this Russian roulette we’re playing
With a crystal ball?
The words at war seem to shrink
From memory forth to possession
But we are not at war, we are at the path
At the stump, at the ford, at the rise,
Where we are at rest in this poem…
And spiders crawl from my clothes.
Wan joy, they scatter toward the mutable shade;
The neighborhood’s outskirts are full of hawks
And there’s always a music playing.
Is this re-telling of the walk
An accompaniment? Either I am
Accompanying your sitting down with a tale
Of nouns achieved on a walk,
or you are the destination of this poem
In which “interest disguises hope”
And spandrels full of powerful feathers
And the phlegmatic faces of
The seraphim fill the roof of heaven.
They seem so calm in their energetic heat,
Circling the throne and chanting.
Does that fire-making motion radiate out and down?
Well, the hot skin on my neck says yes,
And that such a walk is an emulation,
Itself an accompaniment, aspirant to
The form of the finch’s flight
Full of loping dignity,
A dream of great personal fastidiousness
That shadows my trust as I fall toward you
Having stumbled over a large rock;
The shadow of my trust falls about you
Very ably laughing it together into a single form.
And so, there is this kind of relentlessness:
The owl talk, the commerce with the dead,
With the resolutely inhuman,
The creatures and stones, and our dead friend,
That sum of a boy who shadowed us
As we skirted the city, considering
His ears, and ours, made for details,
That he must still hear the music and hawks in his death:
Hear the yogurt falling like snot onto my zipper.
And whose white hair is this,
Caught between my nose and the bridge of my glasses?
Like it, you see me, the poem made by Jared,
Only by shadow, umbra solis, or by moon,
So as to quiet what a reader prompts
In the words that form.
Let morning be morning
A shape at rest;
The stars reflected in
A shovel aren’t dim
They don’t exist.
