EPIPHANEIA

Richard Georges

• Publisher: Out Spoken Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781916046894
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

'They say birds always find their way back home but home is a nowhere — a memory; a never was.'

Set in the immediate aftermath of 2017's Hurricane Irma, the most catastrophic storm to strike the British Virgin Islands, Richard Georges' Epiphaneia stands as a collection of rich, transcendental verse. Beyond the loss and devastation that such a natural disaster brings, Georges' ideas span beyond the physical world, asking us to consider the ways in which families and communities come together amidst such tragedy.

Notes on Road Town

1.

Does light dance the same way in your eyes as mine?

Do not prolong your flight through the eddying air,

Carthage beckons — as always.

There I imagine,

we should have all been poets,

until avulsed by Rome, winged with rubble,

scribbling notes at the base of magnificent columns.

But the daunting day is relentless, my city

looks a wreck beset by weeping clouds, the sea

will not listen to reason, and the punitive clock

does not compromise its metronomic rhythms.

2.

The rains come again to deluge the ghuts,

the island, briefly, returns to a browning in the sea,

the men go down to their boats through the mangrove’s

mangled roots.

Words bud in the mouth, this is all

a hymn. Look at the children, skittering like birds,

a capon poises himself on an unfinished wall,

even he knows the extent of his dominion,

the acreage of his call, the blueblack of his feather.

The ghut waters thunder in backdrop, the dew

has formed in beads on everything — what remains

of the corrugated roofs, the broken, limping hills.

3.

What is the beautiful, needful thing? The fish lie in rows,

bare and blue in the ice. Their bodies, radiant in the tray

of the fisherman’s pickup, the sun skipping along their scales,

their eyes like saucers of ink. I cannot discern where

the lure lanced, when the water broke into nothing,

into death’s frantic dance. The road rumbles, a crowd

congeals, and the exhausted fisherman,

Guinness in hand, flares a gold-toothed smile

at his congregants.

Their voices, ascending,

rebound off each other like breakers.

4.

The fly hums his impromptu arc,

simple sweat and, you know: what must is must is.

Gifts must break boredom. And the water

washes up alongside our cars, running,

always running, and we fear it

coming inside, breaking things as it does.

The word [the world] and all its attentions,

the scientists are in terror, and still

the water is rising.

The townspeople

concur, we must build our new homes in the air.

5.

Perhaps from a cloud perch, or from a fine

cratered moon, storms can be beautiful things.

Exemplars of asymmetry, of a natural mechanics

[as natural as sound], of how they form a language

their own that both poet and fisherman understand.

When the unmaking is stilled, the land

a negative space, there are still ghosts outside,

unstilled. There are still so many winds still

to come. That blue porcelain will not remain

long above us so plainly, so unremarkable.

Thank you for all your blessings and your miracles

Still,

We drove past so many stoic villages, the rows of rice fields,

the centuries of molasses still thick in the nose.

At Parika, the boats sit still in the Essequibo’s silt (thick as molasses)

tied to obelisk rods, their bright favours like crude flags

and the receded water, how brown but s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Dedication
• Epiphaneia
• Dead Reckoning
• On Remembering, Or Dreams of Remembering
• Too Full of Vermouth and Cigarette Smoke
• Genealogies
• The Logic of Perceiving
• Rituals
• Believer
• Pathfinder
• Crown Shyness
• The Storm is Here and a New World is Awakening
• An Inventory for Survival
• Still Life of a Ruin
• A Longer Loneliness
• Altricial
• The Year Has Become More Beautiful
• Thanks
• Notes on Road Town
• Still,
• Listening
• Postlude: This beach is not a beacon
• Essentials
• The Transmutation of Grief
• Origin
• Becoming an Answer
• Heartache is for Lovers, and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves
• Thoughts on Reincarnation
• Prometheus the Titan Descends with Fire
• A Mixtape for Tortola
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