D.S. Marriott
Another Burning
this paper is on fire
being
human, as it incinerates itself
lit from within –
as if being of earth
was itself to be earthed,
a shock: a final, purifying stroke,
lighting up
the most dangerous approach.
descending.
this paper is on fire
and the earth is a room
inside the flames
incinerare
breathed
like a rope of air
where we took
our final, faltering steps
down smoke-filled stairs,
down narrow corridors
a roaring in our ears
openmouthed, blindsided,
our throats already burning
from the portrayal.
And I
like you
among the mute, the breathless, g
the thrice-taken denials
never promise enough.
like a forest you struggle through, r
waiting, penned in –
can’t you hear it
approaching …. ,
the crumbling columns of desuetude e
the summits heaving, sweating
out surprising wisps of air?
like an exhalation rushing over rags, you, roadmen, n
doused & sussed,
uttering the tolls
for the longest journey. f
like a word
falling easily through inflamed lips – e
blackness
wasn’t in the language – we saw it l
being evacuated
but we still inhabited
the ashes. l
the obscure, obsolescent
threshold
never entered,
already neglected, never spotted, never grasped.
the impasse – unable to go up or down
in the prosaic light of faith, tiptoeing
to catastrophe.
words
falling
ever
downwards (the air on fire)
(and as we stumble forward,
a vacuum:
we breathed in its ferocity)
to fall, like
a word,
a word not yet
fallen, but burning,
separated,
unable to cross from landing to safety –
a fall
that has not yet happened:
the breath
that you don’t own
is not yours
to breathe –
hear them: the long doomed
iftar, the already ashen bolari,
and, in the black smoke,
a discarded belgha left
lying in the ruins –
each sentence meaningless
as tall burning buildings loom –
and time ceases,
staggered by fear & shame –
a storey in each story
(each falling). the
story is the storey
within the building
built on charred names.
at the end of the
day, dust
settling, breathed in,
as each gaze turns away,
and there’s nothing
to distinguish a tower from an incinerated outline.
This paper is on fire
lifted out into
the void
into lives lived without air.
the unknown heights
recognized in rooms where there is no
emergency exit.
there is no trace, for here,
everything is lost
trapped without rescue:
and each room
is a cliff where we are
perched on
a rim of burning flame,
and each door
is a vista where we shall
be shipped back to the blaze
brought back to the unknown
shore
like birds
returning back
to the unachieved seas,
the untold dis
of our dear fallen
heirs
transported from earth into air.
and the fire breaking in
waves – a sea from which we were never
meant to be rescued, or leave: every sentence, then,
a station of the last: the buckle
that stays because it can’t be grasped –
still, the tower stood there, still, beyond mere sorrow,
beyond what may be told and what may not,
beyond the burning calms, and each soul a window
illumined by their petrifying ripostes, reflected
on the melting surfaces, the spines of what
will survive us: both scaffold and shipwreck –
as the more dangerous storeys become air and violet
breaths, and each spark an oblivious brute annulment
of the white glare of departure.
whiteness
the height that rains
and sets to right the rightless
ingloried
leaven
as we flame out,
burnt to a crisp –
incinerare –
the whiteness of place unplaced
beyond
language, the last refuge
of loss –
and the unburned
waiting awaited
word
cast out without hope
or arrival.
this paper is on fire
poetry is a medium, a building,
its cladding explodes here,
over tumbling heaven-drenched air:
this paper burns itself, it ascends
over the
black shadowless stains –
and what it unveils it eradicates.
the lives lifelessly resident in the unlived house
where no one wants to live, towering
over what ceases
in the flames,
the charred remains
rising beyond thresholds
of belonging, unliving.
incinerare –
it rapidly crosses the open
the remains inside the ear
that crosses what passes on –
blackness sifted, blanched,
let go, dumped, left in dismay.
g r l
e
n e
f l
this paper is on fire
it cannot breathe
it will crumble
into dust
like a building
that forms itself
into a word
the tap tapping of an
ashen wing
that frees itself
from everything that is air,
O my unhouséd Chevalier!
become a weightless slave
that no room confines
and no refuge,
as if fire were speaking itself:
the word due
expectant but so ruinously
unplanned,
a kind of death-trap
for
the word owing –
to grasp in order to never be grasped
by the ungrasped always,
suspended, freed,
from descent as well as any rescue
lived for,
the paper, unwilling.
for you and I
descent meant rescue,
but there was black smoke
all around us,
and our mistake was in thinking
that language meant
expectancy or survival –
and not something endlessly abandoned,
evacuated.
a word petrified, then cracked.
a void endlessly imprinted,
shaped into concrete.
D.S. MARRIOTT is the author of several books, including: Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008), Duppies (Commune Editions, 2019) and Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018). His chapbooks include In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). Bluetown is forthcoming from Omnidawn.