Antigone - A Sestina

She doesn’t know where exactly, but They are here in the dunes; Their body.

The oppressive nature of love, in memory, fresh, begins again

as a hollow belly, billowing bones. Women’s hungry hands

blot the severity of happiness, its demise, shadowed and compromised

under the pressure; the globular mass of skies, rivers, seas.

Border–Land is outcast, stitching in-be-tween. (No words can encase–

her wayward fits of pain.)

Often, her head is kept quiet, above horizon line, with lullabies of pain–

unbearable. Yet, no tears escape her, no watery bodies

fall, no cries for help, no speech bubbles forth in sea-

foam frothy rage. She is silent. Pallid in her descent, searching, digging–

the sands again.

And Time is such a fickle thing, its collection of used-up wounds, compromised

as varicose vein blood flows, pools, along factory walls, around & around in hands

forming Them through patchwork, swallowed tongues and songs. Her chasm hands

unable to grasp anything at all; their stitches are unmended, their gaps carry pain

all the same. It’ll take too long to reach, home, if there is one left, compromised

by ash and smoke brought on by fire days; (the escaping animals would pile their bodies

on paths and hills, illuminated by starlight’s flicker, strobing outlines that dance again

just outside her eyes. [She wonders if those are the source of the nightmares she sees,

that rotting flesh, debris, the buzzing gnats and maggots which seem to move as sea

waves battling against the body’s shoreline.] ) She is left with sandy hands

that desire a mooring, an anchor in the red, a gentle permission firm again-

st her, a coat of togetherness– reinstated as a space, not a dwelling built on the pain

of “forgotten” as philosophy. She is so tired of “living” & “dying” in-be-tween the

bodies

covered, erased. These calloused, compromised

hands and feet. The bunions cracking. The palms flattened in promise

from drilling, building, surviving the act of see-

ing bombs and missing signs. Hearing the echoes of memory, the faltering power of

bodies,

succumbing to the pressure of green and oil, autonomy in the hands

of the surely rich with grinning beats; Grins beat it out, ambush pain

again. Here goes the rhythm and patterns of snakes, again

there is a pyramid built on top of– a stepping ladder- leaning again-

st Them. A bondage of strain, the warring of distance compromised.

She wishes, no, acts toward a human inhumation, for the pain

does not evaporate, does not dissolve, but layers, grows nauseas

in the stomachs of tender realties springing forth hands

that will not waver, will never cease re-dawning bodies

in sedimentary excavation, breathing life again– the planet’s arc, its seas

beckoning to intimacy, not pain. Their absolute geometries, in-visible hands

decidedly uncompromising in Their refusal to be just sand, disembodied.