Wilder. Claire Wahmanholm
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Relaxation Tape
wilder, v.
arch.
1. a. trans. To cause to lose one’s way, as in a wild or unknown place; to lead or drive astray; refl. to lose one’s way, go astray.
3. trans. and intr. To render, or become, wild or uncivilized. Obs. rare.
WILDER
DESCENT
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good
W.H. AUDEN
whose eyes have never really opened;
who were born with bitter seeds sewn
beneath our eyelids;
whose eye bulbs glow red when salted;
whose sockets grow tall bitter stalks
that sprout small bitter buds
that crawl with aphids;
whose faces are wild fields, and fruitless;
whose throats are peeled peaches, and voiceless;
who collect eyeballs like marbles
and shoot them around a dirt circle;
who drag sickles across each other’s skulls
and leave wet symbols
we copy onto paper—tales of ancient children
who vanished in a flood,
who stumbled from the spring,
who hid inside a haunted wood
to save themselves from drowning.
The ocean calls.
we
cross
six trillion miles of
everlasting night
we
are precious
tendrils of light.
We
may be a sun to someone.
Why should we
be
utterly lost
ADVENT
In the first month of the year
birds curdled the air.
From our windows we watched them
clench and billow, their wings beating
so low to the ground that seeds rose
from their furrows.
When our ears began to ache from the pressure,
we sent out our augurs.
A great fire, they said,
is blowing from the east.
This explained the fevers, the mercury
that broke the levees of our mouths,
the apples that dimpled and rotted
in our orchards, dropping through the leaves
like heart-sized hailstones.
Behind our windows, we waited for the fire to turn
even as we watched the horizon
go red from edge to edge.
Every morning new packs of animals fled
through our orchards. Every morning
new apples dropped into the hollows
of their tracks.
We watched our windows warp and crack,
thought of our daughters’ hot foreheads,
of the fevers we knew would climb and climb
without breaking.
We were out of songs to hum. Our throats were boxes
of soot. In our orchards, no more insect thrum,
no swallow quaver.
How did we dare have children we couldn’t save?
If we closed our eyes, the falling apples
sounded like heavy rain.
AFTERIMAGE
After the explosion: the longest night.
The shock spins a dream around us which,
for our protection, refuses to end.
Outside the dream, songbirds fall from the trees
and sing their way to ash.
Inside the dream, we look out the window
at the sun that is not really a sun, which brightens
and brightens until our eyes are melted glass.
We watch our bodies flicker like lightning
against the wall. We watch them fall
and get back up again and fall
and stay down.
With every breath the dream thins like the skin
of a balloon until we can see the inside
and the outside of the dream at the same time,
the birds swooping from the trees to land
beside their own bones,
our bodies reaching down to grab our shadows
by the hands.
AFTERSKY
The blue noonday sky, cloudless, has lost its old look of immensity
LEWIS THOMAS
Note: there has been some speculation about the state of the sky—
whether it is an infinite mouth dragging its gasp across us
or