Whose Nude and Holy Iridescence Belongs to No One: Thirteen Poems by Richard Cronshey, Part Three

The Sound of Wind at Night

Who is the girl inside the girl
cradling a crow's skull
in small phosphorescent hands?
Dirty snow and cellar stairs.
Am I the sound, late in February,
just before morning,
of wind through white pines?
Or am I the listening?
Or the suddenness without ancestor?
Shepherds in the high pastures inside her body
sit up all night beside campfires, their eyes wide listening
to her deep blue skeleton sing
her black and dreaming names into the world.


Notes To Self

Everything that exists
exists to set me free
from everything that exists.
Like a fire, learn
to erase yourself
as you go.
Abide at the intersection
where futures are consumed.
Be a skeleton key
in flames
releasing daylight from daylight.
Shining
in order to have shone.


Solstice Poem

City of almond, and the way to the city
of almond:
this changing, imponderable body,
a ladder of breath scaling the daylight
and the night,
a bridge traversing everything.
She keeps a sapphire concealed beneath her tongue.
I would be the sound of water to her,
rolling over stones.


Wishing Poem For Terra

This is given, this ritual,
this tilling:
earth turning
under earth;
brilliance under brilliance.
Here now, the orphaned storyteller
comes home
driving her herd of wounds through the high blonde grass and the haze.
For her thirst, the new moon,
immaculate black water
cupped in her cut palms,
raised to her lips.


Sweet Thing

Snowmelt through snowmelt.
Orphans of ourselves these many years.
Let the heart be reconciled with the heart at last.

....

There is a laughing power that releases itself into itself
utterly, flashing, and is here and ours.

....

We see that we must relinquish everything,
that we have always been this relinquishing.

....

Cradled in the circle of the breath,
an ember, a folding together
beyond all efforts.

....

New snow, first light, the presence
in which birth and death are reconciled.

....

Elemental space offered to elemental space,
this is our true ancestor.

....

To be here with this weaving and unweaving forever,
wedded to the weaving of the empty world.


This is the third of three parts of Richard Cronshey's thirteen poem collection, Whose Nude and Holy Irridescence Belongs to No One.