Tuesday poem #499 : Sarah Feldman : The Way Up Down

 

The way up down: one and the same.
              - Heraclitus B60

Turn back now, look: how far
you’ve come, how lightly
passed the trackless
distances which are and are not
the same you must travel now
back. Again you give yourself
to the current – not, this time, to be borne
along, the whole river’s length slipping
by in one flash like a dream-
less sleep. Now the current takes you
piecemeal, exacting, moment to moment,
compensation for the erring ease
of your birth – what’s left to you now
the upstream way and work
of self-unmaking.  So take it – not what you
have dreamed, sung, the sliding clean
from sheathes of skin and muscle
and nerve, the double-knotted chains
and helices of hope and fear and grief
and grief. Go now, harrowed without
by juts of root and rock, within
by a howling up from darkest innards
that chatters bone against bone
and parches the heart’s blood
to a scritch of dead leaves.
Let sea dwindle to river, and river
to stream, to – at last –
the shallows where you began,
the murky rim where water
runs to ground.

 

  

Sarah Feldman’s first poetry collection, The Half-Life of Oracles, was published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside in Fall 2018, and received reviews from Jean Van Loon in Arc and from Ian People in The Manchester Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Literary Review of Canada, Fiddlehead and Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan