Wanda O'Connor
A LESSON OF LEMMINKÄINEN
And now with pulses under wood
have I framed the watchful flood
I came to the water fragile
unfortunate in many things
and at the centre
counting notches with dis-ease
a four-part suite
uncut – & without a middle term
the intervention
a lesson of Lemminkäinen
broken-bodied, trenched back
flush with a honeyed spell
*
Settle this misfitted body
some questions ‘being delivered over’
darkwater projections flat against skin
another celestial strategy
*
I want to be cleft along this cosmetically sealed area
I like a certain number of shades in my landscape 1
I was lying there in a scramble of nets sea nets seaweed I guess
reservoir or watershed
the sea garden
igneous rock – pyrite, slate, obsidian.
Cormorants held the tree, unable to hold the night.
*
Alone, bought into all things
the flimsy cinematic axis
the misassembled form, méconnaissance
the act of tearing apart as Dionysian
χρῆ 2
to be needful of heeding
χρῆ
to fall in revelation upon attack
χρῆ
to be eager upstream, to scrape by suddenly furnished, to have
been proclaimed a yearner, one of borrowed yeses, an orator
moving in on a flame.
*
Language braced up
and of the gush
the struck voice whined the terms and conditions it needed.
I was a satellite in recoil
dreams having soaked through the diurnal sieve.
*
Let me to my own energetic slipping
constellations casting hillsides
having marked the field
derivative
the heat slowly hissing out.
We are entering a long-throated period
I haven’t been alive like you have
the body doesn’t move as it should
1 Ezra Pound, Canto 79
2 it is necessary
2 it is necessary
Copyright © Wanda O'Connor 2017
Wanda O’Connor teaches Creative Writing at Cardiff University. Recent writing is available in Asymptote, Datableed, Magma, Poetry Wales, EPIZOOTICS! and The Best Canadian Poetry 2014 (Tightrope Books). She co-runs the Cardiff Poetry Experiment reading series, writes for libretto and film and translates ancient texts.