Doubt, and: Incorrigible

Abstract

Doubt, and: Incorrigible Safiya Sinclair (bio) DOUBT I There’s nothing of the dinosaurs in these bones—no blue fern locked in the carbon fossil, spirals trillingon spirals recoiling; question collapsing on itself. Nothing carbon can claim to know of me;three-hocked hydra pressed neat in my iron bonebinding these ragged and unlikely molecules, echo clamming the garden dark as a bell,thickening the Sunday crows like old London’swretched rats, leaping and furring, giving birthto themselves. The sermon if you please, is disease. II Ring Gethsemane.I shall be late. Turning my handsabout some troubling verse,my bald body stretched over the silent ether, news of your illness,your boundless assassins. Still trying to pick a dim soundout the clamorous tomb, a bronze chimeI can fix my brow upon. [End Page 322] But somewhere in Kingstonyou are one with the mud,lungs graveled in limestone,mouth ajar, a jawbone stillbegging the silent answer. Only doubt unfurlsin the wind of disquiet; my bodythen too young and too unknowing, now wanting,only wanting to say yes. III Too late at this hour to weanyour heart’s wild membranestill boomed against that flickeringmemory. Against all my careful inventions of love.Blackness in.Blackness out— or something clever you might sayin the blue field where I dream you, wide vectors of tyrannosauruslocked with Nero’s crumbled spine. Where our whole beggaring rabbleis spinning to a blur, all these vast oceansstill coming to a boil. [End Page 323] IV Find my body now at its empty page.Blanched beyond the darkness. Think a thumbprint of sandin Eve’s mitochondria. Where I unburied my own shelland found there no great design.A plain boneto be cast off in a nameless storm;these atoms flung wide and reboundin the ocean’s keening, giving birth to my old selveson a faceless shore. [End Page 324] INCORRIGIBLE All night I wrestled with it—the onerous verse, trying to salt the wound;there are worse things one could fix a gloom upon, I suppose. But I fight to tack it down,the indefinite I, I, iamb; to tease this venom out—its cerasee vine grown thick as my hair, pulling at my limbs, the fur of my mouth.Opening my hand in the fissure of my throat,a gutted fish, I am raking rut out. Beached now on his shore,blanched bone-white, I am watching my grandfather stranglea bucket full of conger eels. Waist-deep in the sea’s phlegm, each finger a purposeful hook, today he is putting light out.From the almond dusk, sun-roasted stiff, spinningtheir brittle halves around, he offers each to me like an eager child, until something in the eel’s eye claps me shut—a dull movement I cannot comprehend. Needto trawl some meaning from our grief; to shake the vaguer shadows out—to rack the placewhere something once moved. Suck the marrow out.Pity the body who knows itself gone apart. How shaking his rough hands gentle round my head,grandfather laughs like a loon, wolf-throated,snapping this stasis like a nylon line. A frightened net of sparrows comes loose in the air;weaving through a thicket of sandflies, picking life out.Are they watching us? Ourselves one drunk [End Page 325] sound in the soundless sea. Grandfather, dizzying.Pity the owl-moth that struck with all its might,night’s shutters unopening. Moon at my window, one slow eye, known-woundI am salting as proof of existence. Pine this self amongst the greenAdirondacks, its blank hem of fog unfurling where something else movesin the eye’s swift blink—beneath its greying leaves,life’s dark unstirring flashed its incorrigiblescream of light. [End Page 326] Safiya Sinclair SAFIYA SINCLAIR was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2015 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from...