"Poems such as these, and there are plenty in this book—John Amen’s third—keep resounding in the mind the way great poetry does...."
—Ricardo Nirenberg, Offcourse Literary Journal
BOOKS: > BOOKS: > Christening the Dancer > The Reawakening
The Reawakening to a father “What is this sleep which holds you now? The hand in the pocket is a fist.
Even the white moon
conceals a jealous heart.
You taught this,
gave me the boa of skepticism,
advised me to study suffering,
scorn the sufferer.
Like an initiate in a cult,
I wandered rivers and swamps
feeding on stalks and algae
until I reached a frozen sea
where I sat as prescribed,
the naked lotus.
My reptilian legacy
wound about my torso
like a steel girdle.
Beneath our weight,
ice cracked its vow.
We plunged together
into a rimy uterus.
In that dark womb,
the coils grew flaccid.
Sap surged through my veins
like electricity restored
after a power outage.
I threw the dead thing from me
as if it were a kudzu vine
yanked from a sapling.
I saw far above,
like a star beyond
a black hole’s suck,
a pinhead of light,
my arm extended toward it
like the bow of a ship.
Gliding up the canal
toward that shimmering orifice--
a root bursting its husk--
I crowned the surface.
Unfamiliar tongues conducted me,
my gasps harmonizing with the dawn.
As if your spell had been broken,
my pores blossomed arias.
Like an amnesiac suddenly remembering,
I recognized the palm trees,
that I was not perishing in some boreal sea,
your constrictor crushing my rib cage,
but lying on the breast of a warm beach
as if in the arms of a wet nurse.
Surrounded by relieved faces, I saw
open hands—they resembled
my own.
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