i.

Everything happened after your birth,

when you left on a boat of herons

a new Eve

not to be eaten

as anybody’s muse

your spine a hearing trumpet 

you blew self-portraits in glass,

and only spoke between worlds 

mère, mer

now mother, now sea.

cosmos of your eyes kindled light

on which to ride the seventh horse 

away from the house of fear 

gallop through the stone door 

to the land of swinging serpents 

singing stories from the well 

Dear pilgrim, come up

here is the memory tower

ii.

There is a way to thread a map 

forming knots at points of collision. 

Without the crash of time, 

space has no memory

I meant to 

make something

But you’ve only ever made

works-in-progress, your studio ever

empty but for the mess: tributary threads

suspended in ropy confusion above us

until I leave you this canopy,

that you might one day

assemble, looking up

We would have no choice 

but to return to the sounds 

before words 

in one place 

expanding out 

 then back 

between carryings but what happens

in this state, when the tremble 

of memory is soul?

iii.

And then came the memory 

of someone who so loved the world 

that they could not stop highlighting her face, 

who at every turn of the gaze would find 

her silhouette made flesh 

and lean into its give. 

Whose ear, tuned to dream music, 

would sharpen a pen and point it 

toward transcribing your tattered robes. 

Who kept flying home, crying home, 

and singing her back, the jazz ache 

of her grief’s webbed movements 

and polyphonic breaths 

keeping time with the ancients 

at the drums, past the trembling 

where words won’t go, these nested rolls 

yoked to something just beyond the reach 

of the given ear, where the pattern of beats becomes so dense that–––

it collapses, 

absorbing our cries 

back 

to some original 

sea.

Stacey C. Johnson

Stacey C. Johnson writes and teaches in San Diego County. She is a graduate of the MFA program at San Diego State University and creator of The Unknowing Project. Her work appears in Oyster River Pages, Pacific Review, and Fiction International, and other publications. Her poetry chapbook, Flight Songs, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (February 2024). You can find her at staceycjohnson.com.