Hypotactic

Suppose meaning arrives like winter. The scarlet

hawthorn clarified under its crest of snow, a season’s

sentence, refining—what will you keep? What won’t you do

for love? Suppose it takes the longest night to see.

Suppose ice-sealed banks along the Kolyma River

retain not only the campion’s white lace flowers—

seeds simmering 30,000 years to bloom again beneath

a Moscow laboratory’s false sun—but also a flight of stairs

revealing the secret bunker where Mussolini held, for the last

time, his pale Claretta; also Hipparchus’s vast, observable

stars. Suppose Gwendolyn Brooks’s handwritten recipe

for Orange Cake floating in permafrost. The first breath

Eve took, rib-pulled into Eden. Alongside, alongside.

Suppose that we emerge into ourselves, stepping from the veil

of a selfish teenage torment that never spins off

early enough to announce to the world, to a father, before

he vanishes in the next room, “I am not only

I.” Suppose, implied in Greek, in stone, above the temple

at Delphi, that knowledge requires a journey.

Suppose below the orlop deck the ship carries not only malarial

chills but girls, tucked behind casks of olive oil, who survived

worse windowless rooms, the nightly . . . . To the creamed

mixture, fold alternatively dry ingredients and liquids. Suppose

the bottom layer can be crooked if the frosting is thick enough

to hold. Suppose I’ll try the weighted blanket.

A thousand microfiber beads. “Earthing,” some call

this, cortisol slowed. Make yourself an offering

to sleep, is what came scripted on the blanket’s violet tag.

Suppose offerings of gold leaf. Sunburnt mirth,

and myrrh. Suppose the new thought the forest clearing

becomes, appearing light-strung from the over-

growth. Suppose you make an offering of that.

A sublayer of carbon slumber, and Patsy’s tralelalela,

and a little crumb of madeleine, which will never decompose.