Geri Doran

The Clary Mist

To be arrived here in the past, scented, sentient
like the present, full of mists that dim a future,
when the creatures—continuous beings—begin

to stir; to be where the impossible sensual world
keeps on insisting do not make less of me as I do
make less of continuous, recursive, all-gathering time.

Less of tenuous breath held between the lips, then blown
toward the stand of three pale birches, the just-planted,
elegant but diffident birches in the old courtyard—

To be arrived thus, and still uncertain in the conveyance
of time between a then newly starting and a now looking
back—was this always to be the return?

For if I am one continuous being—and you are one
walking toward me as myself from then—the line drawn
is a stutter on the cardiograph, an integer’s this-to-this

insistence darkening a segment of time’s thin black line:
the precise bias of then to now, retraced. That time
before was latent—a childhood quickened, breathing in

the mountainous blue air at the speed of my bicycle
or black-laced ice skates—is evident. And time hence?
As the lindens in summer, shaking with honeybees.

This garden-lined path from what seemed, in essence, 
the start of things, and what now, after all the losses,
seems the boomerang’s far curve, is a heavily layered here:

the stuck needle stuttering and darkening, the integer spent, proceeding and backtracking to the courtyard gate
where you, who I once was, stand waiting in the clary mist

for this to come.

You can read more of Geri Doran’s work in the print edition of The Arkansas International Issue 8.

Geri Doran is the author of Epistle, Osprey (Tupelo, 2019), Sanderlings (Tupelo, 2011), and Resin (LSU, 2005). Her work has received the Walt Whitman Award, Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and Stegner Fellowship. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.