Erina Harris

“Ascension 6:49 p.m.”
Excerpt from 7-part poem
“Voices, from which your heart
Shrinks back into your mother’s heart.” Paul Celan
The scrawny last hours of light thin,
and thinner than the elbows of a child. Let
the last light linger, enfeebled, to distill,
for we must still track and gather
their broken lashes before the dimness begins
to hunt the footsteps of women.
Clenched light ends in her hands
and the role of dusk begins
in the village.
The woman who is still alive
staggering through stone alleys.
Still here, the woman, she
staggers
On.
When a staggering woman who is still here
stumbles. In the fancy dress,
equipped with fake pearls, she carries distance,
stolen letters. This woman
walking, speaks out loud, to herself,
and will bargain

that the strange voice among us
is also hers.
From a nearby balcony some drunk, modern daughters
out on a bender, overworked girls with moth-eaten hair toast
the dying sun, among balloons
thrashing imperceptibly on their cords.
The road is trying to find its way home, lit
by line-ups of neckless stars.
Elders stare down gentle pierced punk kids out on strolls.
The woman can call out to things that
do not answer. In the alley,
the oily animal pelt
is tied to a nail.
Lovers everywhere gasp for breath.

Two poems: for Jackie and Dagmar
For Jackie, my Queen of Fallen Things
She who took her life and that of her daughter.
For little Dagmar, her daughter,
Tiny Captain of the Mushrooms.
“It is so unsayable, O God, that you fall to your knees. /
Unsaglich ist das alles, O Gott, dass man erschuttert ins Knie bricht.” G. Trakl
Until they speak of her
in the villages.
And her shadow
elongates its black legend
in the narrow streets
during the hour it attends.
With the bandaged poppy
held in the hands.
Until her dark howl becomes bells.
And the last childhood will ask
“At what time do they come
for her hair?”
Their two voices, to testify, timewards
to plunge rapturously up
into one miracle of disappearance.
Sister-like years.
Voices to carry the Time of Untime.

In the Time of Untime,
brown eyes are remembered.
Nights, she carries the basket
given by an old woman, where now
she keeps the single frozen image.
Citizens devour dice, draw their blinds
to let the dead girl, wayward animal thing, pass.
A dead girl’s hands empty of acts we had names for.
By the window, a girl with a kerchief opens the book
in shadow.
In the Time of Untime,
the sisters found the cloth covered with silence.
The dead girl’s black punk boots march on
to anti-Time,
To pass through her own footsteps into escape,
a blonde eternity, Jackie, ever-hushed, except
for the flutter
of some thing remembering how to fly
or the scream of the child.
Finding her way into the weight of her name
‘till she refuses
to wear the garb
of guests.