Contemplation Is Mourning by Tim Lilburn
You lie down in the deer's bed.
It is bright with the undersides of grass revealed by her weight during the
length of her sleep. No one comes here; grass hums
because the body's touched it. Aspen leaves below you sour like horses
after a run. There are snowberries, fescue.
This is the edge of the known world and the beginning of philosophy.
Looking takes you so far on a leash of delight, then removes it and says
the price of admission to further is your name. Either the desert
and winter
of what the deer is in herself or a palace life disturbed by itches and
sounds
felt through the gigantic walls. Choose.
Light comes through pale trees as mind sometimes kisses the body.
The hills are the bones of hills.
The deer cannot be known. She is the Atlantic, she is Egypt, she is
the night where her names go missing, to walk into her oddness is
; to feel severed, sick, darkened, ashamed.
Her body is a border crossing, a wall and a perfume and past this
she is infinite. And it is terrible to enter this.
You lie down in the deer's bed, in the green martyrion, the place where
language buries itself, waiting place, weem.
You will wait. You will lean into the darkness of her absent
body. You will be shaved and narrowed by the barren strangeness of the
deer, the wastes of her oddness. Snow is coming. Light is cool,
nearly drinkable; from grass protrudes the hard, lost
smell of last year's melted snow.
