The Pivotal Kingdom
by Alice Fulton
(published in her 1994 book, Powers of Congress, David R. Godine, Publisher)
A head capsized the wild mechanism of May
and a body followed, casting off
its muddy husk.
I gazed at him from the raised walkway
of the excavation site,
through dust the color of suntan.
I wanted to stroke a thing so warmly
smooth, a uniform khaki, on bended knee.
I wouldn’t mind touching hands
tensed round centuries
of hiatus in place of vanished weapons.
His motions tabled for millenniums,
he’d had a long word with the earth.
He’d lodged in its plutonic gut,
an emptiness strung with pulse. Like all mortals,
I have a nodding acquaintance
with the dark.
You know our slogan: keep it light.
The tiled tunnels beneath rivers, fallout
shelters, the undersides of bridges
where sunbeams slither
like lizards on adhesive toes
are good at holding
shadows. But shadows aren’t hard
blackness as much as patterns
lit by lesser light.
Even our refrigerators are stuffed
with glow, like well-appointed homes.
Though it’s no strain to visit the abandoned
mines beneath Detroit,
the transformers choked in power
lines under Manhattan’s tailored granite,
I wouldn’t want to lodge
in the clay warrior’s dense bed.
I’d miss the inner city
of sensation so solid you’d swear it was
embodied: Yearning, an expansive
mansion in the marrow; pain,
a charger of barbed wire;
and joy, a freed slave hoisting
hallelujahs through the nerves.
But is this private sector hidden
in heart or brain or bone?
Docs it hold
eminent domain inside our heads, live in
vivid ampules under wraps
of fat, swim through tissue's minnowed shadings
or skin sublit by polar longues,
the opalescent flecks of cellulite
like spectral residues
in flesh? As Socrates said
life's intrinsic
to the soul but accidental
to the body. He said
if the spirit does exist
it isn't a good mixer. In my book
inclusions are not accidents,
though accidents exist.
It's best to conscript them,
the way jazz repeats a slip
till it sounds right.
Just think, it was a mistake
made by plants that created oxygen
and led to us, builders
of plants that change air back
to what our lungs can't trust.
The pivotal kingdom holds
crossbows rigged against intruders,
terra cotta soldiers guarding
rivers reproduced in small,
and shuttlecocking constellations
at the lop. Walking, we're borne
up by glancing blows
that form the ground, spirit cities
fraught with once and future
euphorias, with wars.
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