Hannah Craig
Another Engine

I.
We enter the house of the winter, carrying our birdseed bride. She will scatter, soon. She will fade. In a month, the bag of fat will be drained. The house full of mice and dried
sage. In a month, memory will demand an actual image. A crutch. A sequence of events. A quest.

II.
Go into the field and bring back sheaves of wheat. Go into the olive groves and the grape arbor and bring back the bodies of your brothers. Go to the battlefield and pick the asphodel which grows there.

III.
We enter the house of January. Should I forget you, oh January?

IV.
The dove-cote has been painted blue, dust cantilevered into the massive eaves. Struck out, voices buckle behind tunnels, columns, girder, beams. The voices buckle already—the precious structure is collapsing. We enter the house of January clothed in robes of fire. My father is dead. The children come to me and open their hands. Look the beginning…[]…a…to find from (2 lines unrecoverable)…defilement which….

V.
The fallen bodies complicate matters—the stacks of bodies, the unclean roses of bodies, the cabal of rotting plums. Everywhere we fly by. We fly…the everywhere. Some space into which the word is already flown, created, recreated. Some wind returns the blade-edge light and then beats forward.

VI.
Go into the field and bring back the dead. Go to the edge of the world and retrieve all who have fallen. Who can teach me to find God? Those that […] all in a […] blessed, and they […] like a salamander. So many of these, my brother. So many of these. No more in the body or frayed soul. No more in the word or thought of a word.

VII.
We enter the house of snow, carrying our tinsel bridge. Soon she will fade. Soon she will be torn apart and reconstituted as a series of pipe cleaners. In bottles on the window-sill. In the steam from mulled wine. Forget the quest—we demand sleep. Forget sleep—we demand dreams. Waking dreams. Foreign dreams. And after those, even more.

VIII.
Go into the body and bring up the soul. Temper it, coil it like malleable copper. Teach it. Teach it to mend its own clothes. To find the rip in the hem, to thread the needle
with fine-lit-wire. With burning wire. With fog and the hair of angels. The body, it complicates things. My body’s heart is pure—it’s the spirit sister that can’t be taught, that
can’t be tooled down, that can’t be stopped. O there she goes. O there.

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