arion

who or what is arion? what's the deal?

You’ll find the raw text at the bottom, if you prefer to read in that format.

Musical Pairing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COxXOGzud1k

arion | E. G. Ware

they come without hinge or evensong, 

no carapace to confess them, no shrine to hold their name, 

only a wet rudiment, a glossolalia of muscle and sheen,

written in the low vowels of loam.

they advance: slow/sole/soul,

a rhyme that fattens as it moves,

a mouth unmoored from any face

in the garden’s margin, where measure should keep its border,

they make of boundary a hearsay: blush becomes blemish, 

leaf becomes leaving, the green script of rows dissolves to cursive excess.

not one, not two, but a quorum of soft insistence,

each body a question the soil keeps rejoining: more, more:

mòr/amor/umor

the tongue slips, the word dilates,

and appetite outpaces its own etymon.

they are difficult to tell apart, as grief, as rain, 

color unfastened from essence, hue a consequence of what has been 

taken in. eat to become / become to erase. 

see how they write themselves along the stems: a silvered estimation, 

viscous, continuous, a theorem of trespass proved in increments, 

not breach but seep, not rupture but revision.

the beds once held their lines like arias,

now every outline murmurs, over, over, over

overrun/overripe/overtaken

the rhyme refuses closure, refuses the mercy of end.

where a seed dreamed upward, a mouth arrives to prefigure 

bloom’s undoing, to eat the future in its syllabic husk.

do you hear: even the stones grow fluent in damp, even the fence 

forgets its function. a crossing occurs without event, 

no gate unlatched, no hinge confessed: only the slow annulment of between.

they leave a script the morning can’t quite read,

lucent as breath on glass, a residue that says: we were here, we are still,

we will be after the naming fails.

and they move

slew/slow/slough

shedding no skin but the idea of limit, unhoused, unbounded,

a congregation of need made tender and terrible.

once rendered down to grease, bodies a balm for the axle’s complaint, 

motion fed by what would not stop moving.

the wheel learned their lesson: friction is only hunger with a harder name.

so the field remembers them as accidence:

a way of saying without, a way of crossing without,

a way of taking that feels like becoming.

until nothing stands apart long enough to be spared, and the earth, 

overfull, 

begins to speak in their dialect:

mire/more/never-enough

a chorus without consonant, a feast without finish.

© E. G. Ware