Anniversary
This yearly pilgrimage in search of you is like a stone
split open, capable only of revealing more of itself,
the long, mirrored journey back towards the known.
I think of your cells broken up like honeycomb,
their brittle matrices delicate as breath.
This yearly pilgrimage in search of you is like a stone.
The mountain holds your body close to its overgrown
passages and the hard ache of its silent gulf,
the long mirrored journey back towards the known.
At the hotel, three badgers with their bandit moan
reflect the dark shudder of themselves.
This yearly pilgrimage in search of you is like a stone.
My brother turns his face into a blank unknown,
reaching past the hilt of your misremembered death,
the long, mirrored journey back towards the known.
Against the sharpness of the horizon's whetstone,
I play your disappearance out across myself.
This yearly pilgrimage in search of you is like a stone,
the long, mirrored journey back towards the known.
Eria Murphy’s Whetstone is a book of disappearance, transformation, and death. What’s sharpened against the whetstone are “mysteries / of the body”, reckonings with grief, and relation to the non-human. Murphy is interested in the “hard outline” of where a body begins and how it can be a map and mirror for life beyond its own creatureliness. This is a collection of formal range, sinuous language, and rich imagery.
