Photo Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Renaissance Tapestries

Discovery is Ruin

All bequeathed to me collapses
from this sphere onto allotments
of ancestral land. Olives

in my grove ripen more urgently
each year to slump into waxy rot
upon submerged roots.

Bitumen will worm over freshly
sprung now and then, interred
in greasy blackness under a mantle

at last enkindled into a hopeless
souvenir. In gnarled shapes on
vernal crust, within the arbor vitae

olives in my grove ripen more urgently
each year. All that was written,
all one may see sings of revolution

and counter revolution at last
enkindled into a hopeless souvenir.
Promised lands revered by ages

reaffirm smallness and collections of
frailty as sweet as the cinnamon silt
that spiced the nadir of my demitasse.

All that was written, all one may see
becomes deliquescent memory
in afternoons aspiring to humble yet

not to cast doubt. As bronze
and shadows are cast, poems reaffirm
smallness and pale frailty.

Let our undisclosed atrophies
be celebrated among invisible trees
for discovery is ruin save humility.

I have loved this coy grove
as it teases- aspiring to
humble and not to cast doubt.

When the laughter of my uneasiness
is again deconstructed, bitumen will
worm over freshly sprung now and then.

Humility save ruin is discovery
and I will stand from my rivers of
roots like a cedar embracing the seedy

cones and needles of our frail humanity;
for discovery is ruin save humility,
and I intend to smile with wrinkled bark

and I intend to waver in a Mediterranean
wind as all that was once bequeathed to me
collapses from this olivine sphere.

Marc Awodey


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