the destroyer > text > Sheila Black

RAPTURE

The word for rapture was a distant ache.
The furrow, the green that breaks

through the handful of grains, the blood on
the fields, the fish-spine, the bone-

meal. I will tell you how that shade burned
my eye-ball until I felt I was holding

in my head a small drunk sun, which was not you.
But which was like you because around

I felt as-self alight, raptus, the bird that floats
windshear before descending so abruptly.

With such intent one feels a riddle, a wiry knot
in the fabric of time. So like when we

talked at first and later the ashes, later the verdigris,
the condor-beak, late spring and the fields a mess and

maybe I did not want to know what would grow
from this or from this my our “rapio,” a

“carting off by force,” as I would have termed
You: moving-alive, a-move in your eyes, and never

respite, respiring. Never like the tree at noon but always the
bald surface of any field, a paroxysm for any hunter––

that silvered earth, a shudder in which what is
weak is blood-impulsive, snatched, impaled, the

jest of the offered throat, the tendered hand,
The greening of us and what sprung from it, as to belong

is always to set oneself up against another thing,
And the highest fortresses as if requiring the most rapid

and brutal sacking.



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