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The eye is the first circle
Esther Kondo Heller





the eye is the first circle/its fertile yolk swallows the swimming head/to join O-shaped holes join to make unshaped masses of futures/ futures with centers everywhere but no circumferences/are mothers Gods? that watch over lives till birth/ have faith and believe in mother’s righteousness and all things will be added to you/birth cuts many ties/yet, just as the umbilical cord is coiled another circle is drawn over another/there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning/ under every deep a lower deep opens/there are no fixtures in nature/the universe is fluid and volatile/ one morning I drooled on my mother’s jumper/ another year she was gone and I have been drooling on lone mattresses ever since/ so the wetting moved from skin to cloth/ new relationships built on the circle I have had to draw away from /home/ home that I have drawn words around/ home that has two windows and a door and a family waving with small hands that can build walls/ a never ending construction of a foundation based on the Huxtables, the Banks, the next door neighbors with the dog, the Sunday that is reserved for family/ my brother used to say “I am whiter than you”/ another used to say “you are blacker than me”/ now we all say “blacker than thou”// daddy needed/ just needed a smoke/ huff and puff blow this home in/ we all took bricks built circles around us now we cannot hear each other breathing or dying/ we just wander these concrete streets// don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge// I have already lost my head over this but I’m surviving// I have survived// so I deserve this for those that died for this// no one will see the hard decaying cocoon that hangs in the closet from which poetry resurrected as a butterfly/poets have been speaking in circles to draw yours in/poets arouse with shrill tones/ break up a whole chain of habits and open all eyes to the possibilities/you say this is a mood but poets know that moods do not believe in each other/ that conversation is a game of circles/the poet emancipates us from the oppression of the previous speaker then oppresses us with the greatness and exclusiveness of their poetry then leaves the stage for the next redeemer/poetry clasps wings to all the solid old lumber of the world/therefore, we value the poet/for a while/till a new circle is drawn and we stuff eyes with onions/ whose roots hold our bones together/maybe someday you will cut rings like chains that will bring your eyes to tears/to the beginning to the

hands to the sounds of the ocarina/to the umbilical cord/ to the fluids/to the eyes that watch down on you/to the circles around your mother’s eyes/ to the grapes that formed in grandmother’s breasts/to the movement/ to the inner circle/ sat under dim light drinking, praying, reading, dreaming and speaking/ whose inner became so full that you saw them from Selma to Montgomery to Brixton to Ferguson to Arusha/whose circles became so large that they sat on all seats/to the hands that ate pilau from one silver plate on his burial/ to that which Lee calls a movement/ she cannot explain it/because all these circles have been drawn not just by her but by all that is living in the marrow of all our bones/ drawn by blood that has pumped and is pumping colors to sprout and multiply illuminated by the light of the circles// the sun/the moon/ the earth/the womb/born in circles we come back again & again & again & again & again & again & again & again /we are all just samples of heartbeats//maybe we scratched out the lyrics// shifted the pitch but the tune of our ancestors is still there // somewhere in the mix of it all/A jazz musician in a bar in Peckham spoke into the microphone and said that the abstract is arbitrary and arbitrary is the space between something we cannot explain so it is valuable so we should value it or something like that//






Composition
Esther Kondo Heller