A FORM OF HOPE

A FORM OF HOPE

I am older, now,

and not as strong

or weak

(dull, salt eyes w/ swollen

shopping bags 

underneath)

not quite so quick

          on my feet.

                     I’ve learned,

I think, in my 

           short time 

                     to carry the wounds 

called wisdom, 

           and to heavily 

                     xxxxx out 

in layers of thick

           red ink 

                     the tender words,

the Achilles’ 

           feet. 

ii.

Some things, like sleep, do not

grow sweet, but only 

dull with age: like pain, which against 

the common wisdom, does not 

make one grow stronger—just 

so long as it doesn’t end 

in murder—but rather, whether 

totally and all at once, or some-

what more infrequently, by slow 

degrees, metes out, in cumulative 

blue increments, small death 

upon small death, until you’re 

largely cracked, & 

frequently spent, & 

a little bit broke, & 

sweetly dead—

iii.

as I am sweetly

dead, a foresworn 

sweetness of sweet-

limbed ghosts, 

or swollen pantomime 

of roses: a broken 

skin of windows. 

I am less, I guess, with the 

strength I’ve left,

so I build salt cities 

on sunken coasts—

sullen, & ruined, 

& lovely, & alone—

& name each one:

“a form of hope.”

 

~

all these fragments have been

redeemed too many times

until the thing’s a shabby, patchworked sublime

this is better, to write it down, the words

might not be

more, or bright, or strong, or proud,

or anything at all: a sense 

of ghostlier abstractions

in a grid of layered towers

compacted

into a flowing, frost-sick dome 

in rising rows of metronomes

the tick of my broken meaning

*

my sadness comes out in little spurts

and i feel dissatisfied

*

It’s out of fashion to write about heroes. It presumes a secret heroism.

There’s a misunderstanding about heroes that can be traced to one of the first heroes, Achilles. 

It is true that Achilles is a hero, and the best of them. 

Achilles was murdered by his own image. He let this happen so that you and I could live on, which makes him a hero. Forever after, though, there’s been a war between Achilles and his image, for whom he’s often mistaken. 

Achilles, the hero, refused to fight, believing his life to be worth far more, and having no quarrel with the Trojans or anyone else, not even Agamemnon, for whom he felt sortof bad 

for having manipulated to get himself off the hook.

already a killer, Achilles’ image (we’ll call him Kleos) thought nothing of murdering Achilles and stuffing the body in a poem called the Iliad. 

That’s where it’s been ever since.

*

Achilles was a sweet boy. 

a dark thundercloud inside his sinuses allowed him to stand outside himself and watch his 

body

the thundercloud said, ‘step on that frog.’ the low-threshold buzzing all around kept 

buzzing

and the monarch worms made a bright noise chewing holes 

and didn’t notice

and all the world was the same, except that Achilles saw

the insides of the frog become outsides, and felt not at all the passing of that other life

and this terrified him, and that’s when he learned to hate cruelty. 

*

Sigil claimed to understand the mathematical formulas by which Lysippus transformed the human face into the idealized mien of his historical busts.