Meditative Week of Poetry: Corey Van Landingham
Suppose meaning arrives like winter. The scarlet hawthorn clarified under its crest of snow, a season’s sentence, refining—what will you keep? What won’t you do for love? Suppose it takes the longest night to see. Suppose ice-sealed banks along the Kolyma River retain not only the campion’s white lace flowers— seeds simmering 30,000 years to bloom again beneath a Moscow laboratory’s false sun—but also a flight of stairs revealing the secret bunker where Mussolini held, for the last time, his pale Claretta; also Hipparchus’s vast, observable stars. Suppose Gwendolyn Brooks’s handwritten recipe for Orange Cake floating in permafrost. The first breath Eve took, rib-pulled into Eden. Alongside, alongside. Suppose that we emerge into ourselves, stepping from the veil of a selfish teenage torment that never spins off early enough to announce to the world, to a father, before he vanishes in the next room, “I am not only I.” Suppose, implied in Greek, in stone, above the temple at Delphi, that knowledge requires a journey. Suppose below the orlop deck the ship carries not only malarial chills but girls, tucked behind casks of olive oil, who survived worse windowless rooms, the nightly . . . . To the creamed mixture, fold alternatively dry ingredients and liquids. Suppose the bottom layer can be crooked if the frosting is thick enough to hold. Suppose I’ll try the weighted blanket. A thousand microfiber beads. “Earthing,” some call this, cortisol slowed. Make yourself an offering to sleep, is what came scripted on the blanket’s violet tag. Suppose offerings of gold leaf. Sunburnt mirth, and myrrh. Suppose the new thought the forest clearing becomes, appearing light-strung from the over- growth. Suppose you make an offering of that. A sublayer of carbon slumber, and Patsy’s tralelalela, and a little crumb of madeleine, which will never decompose.