Motets in Amber, and: Migration

Abstract

Motets in Amber, and: Migration Rebecca Dunham (bio) Motets in Amber Bring to me the two hot fingers.Forehead and temple, they flashover a cornfield's rows,anesthetized and curared, alldried stalks choppedyellow sharp, stunted knives. I'll convulse beneath the storm,my body rubbed byits woolen cloth to somethingrich and new. Amber-bright,I gown myself and go forthfrocked in feather, straw, and leaf. * If the past shines like a fixedstar reflected in the deepest well;if its spring muddies his chillfeet, all wet and wildering; Thalesof Miletus will fall, felled bya wild thirst down earth's pitch tube. * Amber: literally, burn stone. Orin Arabic, straw robber. Duskybirds hang like a handfulof ash thrown into air. Electric:borrowed from the Greekelektron, amber. Out our car's [End Page 118] window, I watch Illinois pour by,power lines lashed to richsoil. Moored as if by a wound'sstitched thread, its black cord. * The frog's dead muscles twitch,kindled by jolts from Luigi Galvani'selectrostatic machine, provingThales of Miletus right: there isno difference between the livingand the dead. Our nerves fire and seek; what connects us burnsfilament-bright, incandesces.Resinous and vitreous in our glassyvacuum, still we spark, chargedtungsten coiling. Why do I notdie? Because there is no difference. * My son traps fireflies in glassjars, a constellationto light his room, to flashlike semaphores across his sleep. Nothing ends, or everything, if,thunderbolt, you leave your cloud. In daylight, their dullamber bodies clickagainst the jar's clear neck. * [End Page 119] Lamprey-like, lightning writhes,June 1752, key knottedto a silk string, a continual streamthe size of a Crow Quill, the bellsring and ring, plasma and kite,a slick flash, a continued, dense,white stream whereby the whole staircasewas enlightened as by sunshine,filling Leyden jars, the violetcorona of a ship's mast and rigging,a blur no man can handfast. * Injured, my body exudes itsamber globules. Syrupy, sappedplanets fed to earth's soil,its blue loam, a resin fossiled lapidary fine. Only to be liftedon ocean's current, eel, torch, whiplash,its long muscled arm, and foamits way ashore. Set me aflame.Aburn. Apine. [End Page 120] Migration Two shoals of geese flylow, mixing amid the carscrossing Cedar River. Snowsieves down and dark-necked,the birds honk likelong-married couplesquarreling over which wayto go. I steer fromthe place I was to the placethat I am going. Migration:from the lost adjective*migros, or moving.Etymology explains meto myself far better thanpsychology. To my doctor,I don't even try to explain,I never do. The birdssort things out and headtheir separate ways, backon course. Of course, Iknow what I am: lost, homeless,each abandoned selfrosaried and strung throughits vacant core. All nightthis bothers me. Onepoint-bird must be wrong. [End Page 121] Rebecca Dunham Rebecca Dunham's first book of poetry, The Miniature Room, won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and was published by Truman State University Press. She has received an NEA fellowship and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in FIELD, Iowa Review, and Antioch Review, among others. Copyright © 2010 University of Nebraska Press