in which iphicles imagines (how else the story might have gone)

(i)

in another version of the story
daddy doesn’t turn to tumours

doesn’t lose the means to walk
and brother doesn’t carry him

to water where the horses
stamp their hooves and turn away

(ii)

in another version of the story
daddy doesn’t drown

just gets old
then older still

so we watch him –
skin slackening

bones hollowing
joints fusing

eyes milk-white dividing
split the gaze

(one eye looks upon the world –
the other on the question underneath)

(iii)

in another version of the story
daddy just grows old

and quiet
till one day he doesn’t speak at all

so herc and i, we see ourselves –
see how a body’s just a line that ends

and how a father’s not a thing
if not a map to silence

(iv)

and before he goes, herc and i
will find him there one day –

standing at the water’s edge
as though he sees another way

my brother will be on his way
to claim the murder in his name

and i will only ever be a question
and daddy, standing always

at the water’s edge
will only ever be

a kind of silence
calling back.

in which iphicles imagines (drowning)

1.

in everything i write
there is a drowning scene

in which the body is
and isn’t water

in which everything is
swallowing

and being swallowed

2.

i want to blame everything
on where we are in history

                              (which is to say:
                               ‘observed or not
                               the boy is always
                               drowning’)

3.

and sometimes there is a return,
sometimes not

sometime a witness,
sometimes not

4.

i dream (and it is like this) –

eyes filling first with blue
and bursting out from in
/ erasing /
/ boundaries /
/ seeing everything /

and then the world is named
( a grief  )  ( a grief  )  ( a grief  )
 
5.

all i want
is to make ‘blue’ a name
for bursting out

as leaving is 
 
6.

i will tell my brother one day:
it was panic first
a churning blue ( inversion )
then something resembling quiet

that the moment before he pulled me
from the water
hauled me up by the hair
i thought “a thing like this is not so bad”

that there should a name
for this colour of water

a grammar for the pressing in

for the “okay then” of outward breath
(such pretty bubbles rising)

7.

and then the sudden rushing in.