Words for the Chisel (collection)/Long Dialogue

4363129Words for the Chisel — Long DialogueGenevieve Taggard
Long Dialogue
One Voice
Endure the dark,
I have turned
You out on chaos. . . .
My need is deep
To open to such corners on the earth.
What is it then you envy so?
You who are nothing
Who might suddenly start
Up from my torpor, up from sleep.

Enter not now, through me, into agony: the narrow groove of birth.
Endure the dark.
I have turned
You out on chaos.
Enter not now, through me.
Endure where
You are in darkness howling with the wind.
And I with you, I limited, you blind.

Elemental, pure,
Endure
Darkness and the terrible lust of speed.
I move
On a firm planet, still, in me, the stream,
The precipice of space, the earth's groove. . . .

Endure the dark.
Strangely, I endure
The nothingness of you—your
Unbodied being. This insistent pain
Is mortal illness, being neither in
The glut of life or death, caught in meshes, given
Space still to turn
About a nothingness that in its time
Will have its atoms and its tiny suns.