FABLE Poem: Summer, by Haley Wooning

1.

night after night, sunken ships dream of a thousand, pale hands
reaching up from the bottom of seaweed like insects gorging on
bodies bled into god’s great scalp

is this a train of too-many-images? I myself get lost in them, despite
my clamoring – for sleeping, for waking – my mind remains a lost chamber
and what falls apart in me

falls moondark like motes over thick patches of snow –
will never be found there – it scatters even further and I must confide now that

I never lost faith in the world, and the rivers that lived here never shut over me never
dragged me below never – drowned me but somehow

hunger stopped – when? loneliness started grafting its
long webs across the human gut where life is home and now nothing
Grows in its place, I hope it is not
my fault, isn’t it?

2.

invisible as the hard work of being alone – preparation
for home or for work, for bills, for humiliation or failure – preparation for
whatever is to come next, even dreams, those endless

wandering corridors and strange hallways where no one is there to open
a door or heed a call, eventually
the body tires trying to make sense of it, of lining up all these various tasks
while putting derangement into neat order

and the world wheels on, unfolding in a dazzlement of countless tales,
a history of spellwork, dragons and crickets and hags and bees – do you remember
your childhood? the fact of fireflies? the looming trainsounds that
fell off the horizon? all of this disappears,

bones bare in the soil, here and there, something chewed on and spat back out –
one must prepare for the final exhaustion, the moment when the spirit is
too tired to stir again, and shuts its sweet eyes forever

3.

swept and abstract as
the misty wings of dragons

the spirit, exhausted by
necessity- hidden in the

wardrobe shut against the world –
in the mind’s blank fog, not even

spring registers, but I remember
dreams, the emptiness of waking

in the middle of a longing soon to be
forgotten come the sun’s

bleak recognition – that old, tired question
pulled apart into pieces behind the chariot:

why am I thus and not otherwise?

4.

thundering fawnhood, stinking river-mulch
I arrive at the river where you loved me,

I count the empty spaces between my fingers where
on the mossbed my

hands stay open in the long wait
for rain to fall, for dusk to harken each
moment into each moment

sometimes when I am like this, I shut my eyes and wish
at the sky’s bottom another ocean where the birds swim – places
where humiliation does not exist, I go there – I touch the sea’s end where my imagination

tangles like feet in seaweed
like a gnat lost amongst the fallen kingdoms of spiderwebs, like
something not me, how long will it last?

woods my imagination grows home into
life far away, further than the green outside

the heart’s
sputtering
windmill – then decay

5.

green distance, blackbird soaked
the cemetery’s steeple scrapes the sky down to a fog’s pallor

in centuries away, my pulse thickens the woodland hum
and I am neither fearful nor lonely, what the seawaves shape

into the cliffsides is as familiar as my own hands, I am like those
that lived and died below this great tree that hugs the

hillside carved so deep with graves and their etched stones – my loves
and I, we walk the narrow stepways before the sun sets blue dark

at the water – their bare feet leave proof as deep as the world
we dance on the heads of giants –