The Repository Of Souls

Enkidu: "In the house of ashes, where I entered, . . . There sits the queen of below-earth, Ereshkigal: Belit-tseri, tablet-scribe of the underworld, kneels before her. [She holds a tablet] and reads aloud to her. Lifting her head, [Ereshkigal] looked directly at me—me: `[Who] has brought this one here . . .?” __Gilgamesh, XII.iv

I bring this to his attention, for no reason
but the impulse to make my mother's words
his own and infelt: her letter to him, drafted
then abandoned in the unabridged dictionary.
And now, after she died, after her lilting voice, too,
has begun to vanish, these words
are suddenly exhumed to trammel
her tacit husband. Misery is here;

each sentence is preponderant—fitful and
desperately precise so that he might reckon
even her compulsion to heft these words
in the very crucible of words, a language
more savage than her own. I think

I understand what those faintly pencilled choices, those
painstaking hyphenations in the letter's margins—
"lach•ry•mose
(shedding my tears);" "pusillanimous (you are fainthearted,
uncourageous)"—
must have meant to her, teased
out of the wider knowledge. Darkly aboriginal. My
inexplicable and hackneyed whim to crush,
for instance, inside that very book,
the slip of bog brush I snipped in her memory.
I wouldn't think to look at it again
until, one day, from out of the pages,
from out of the very word "heather,"
the clumsy purplescent scatter on corduroy.
Powerfully spoken. Or years later,
this sensual ritual with my lover: the two of us
arched again above the dictionary, shaping our
mouths to the sound, the syllables of things:
the accents on "concupiscence," or soulful pleasures
of pronunciation in "agap," and more. How seeking out
the names of feeling would itself become
an urgent glossary of gesture
more moving than language, such

that my father, imbued here
with prophecy from a vast

speechless repository of souls,
crumples her burgeoning letter
back into its germinal seeds,
and that is all.
Once read, the forthright
wishes of the dead have already
come to pass.
 

© Karl J. Sherlock