Syrinx, riverside
BY JAMES MCKENNA
What I passed through to get here: switchgrass, bulrush, cattail: brutality of the brush: my brushing past & how I got here at all: I thought it was a haunting: a god this wild could be god only of what lies within his reach: & I fled: aware the cost of such reluctance: sylvan graveyard as much a mirror as river’s surface: how it slips past where I stood once: unremembering my ankles cut into the current: wind & morning everywhere: the tall stalks: a danger of them: I did not beg: but something like it: perhaps prayer: only sisters of the river listening: I would join them: something like joining them: his hand in my hair: the sudden wheat: that I could take: but it was my blood: cooling: how it turned to water: glass running through each vein carrying my own unbecoming: I could not scream: his hand wrapped around my throat: to find no throat at all: no: but the reed I was: I screamed for my body: I screamed for him to let go: & still the only sound that escaped me: a low whistle: the pitch of wind: & he heard this, & he called it song, the way a child mistakes his mother’s cries for laughter, the unknowing they share, & the child thinks this song is for him, it is, & again: the song is his: this instrument: his: when he cut away at my body, I did not scream: I suffered his desire. He fashioned me to panpipe & this is called origin… But listen: to originate means to come into being & I have: he thinks he casts music into the air when it is my curse: men, gods alike dance to my breath: they go to sleep warm in their memory of me: they think it is the wind outside that stirs them awake: they walk to the river & find not a girl, no: but all of her blood. after Brigit Pegeen Kelly