nthposition online magazine

Imago

by D Nurkse

[ poetry - february 07 ]

We are statues and now must learn
to zip our pants and floss our teeth -
can you conceive of the great labor
of tying our shoes, spindling granite,
pure resistance, into a cord, and mastering
the sequence of irrevocable gestures
to make a knot? Imagine undoing it at night?

We have to practice suffering
so we stand in the driving rain
telling ourselves, tremble, tremble,
but it means nothing. We tell ourselves,
suffer, but the command has no picture.
We murmur, marble, because that word
is what terrifies us, and slowly
we feel a few drops, a lashing at our eyes
that cannot close, inch by inch
we begin to rub together, we learn
the great tasks, delighting, resenting,
envying, shitting, pissing, coming, waiting,

and faintly we remember the violence
of the chisel stroke that made us,
namelessness of the master's hand,
how our eyes were bevelled, with a flick
for the pupil, though all we see is stone.