After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
The stiff Heart questions, was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —
This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —
When someone dies young
a glass of water lives
in your grasp like a stream.
The stem of a flower
is a neck you could kiss.
When someone dies young
and you work steadily
at the kitchen table
in a house calmed by music
and animals’ breath,
you falter at the future,
preferring the reliable past,
films you see over and over
to feel the inevitable
turning to parable, characters
marching with each viewing
to their doom.
When someone dies young
you want to make love furiously
and forgive yourself.
When someone dies young
the great religions welcome you,
a supplicant begging with your bowl.
When someone dies young
the mystery of your own
good luck finds a voice
in the bird at the feeder.
The strict moral lesson
of that life’s suffering
takes your hand, like a ghost,
and vows companionship
when someone dies young.
It’s been a strange year.
They feel for pulses with deadened hands, guiding mute
fingers over static triggers: unloading existence under a cold case.
Careful not to push for fear of the deafening shot—
the finality of our endings and beginnings. The finality
of night, familiar faces in flashing reds and blues.
We are the anesthetized, the mouths wide open,
the never-saw-it-coming. Masses of haphazard crises, crying
Emergency! from cracked lips, lying still in splintered skin.
We are the splatter of paint on pavement, wondering: is God
the brush or the anti-stroke? The boy driver, somnambulant
bearing medicines and miracles—is he our impressionist,
the driving force? We pray to a medium and the blotted
colors of lights on fractured glass. To think: could someone speak
of light and sound as aimless? Of words: mechanical,
suicidal structures of noise from the back of our throats?
The diction of our human vulnerability, so easily destroyed.
We are arranged in pieces on the asphalt, a malleable
composition of the masterpiece. Waiting for the artist
to justify some catastrophe. The pick-me-up.
The driver who carries a license to live.
(I don’t know if I like this. It meets assignment criteria, sure, because of its syllabics. But I think the language is mediocre. Anyone out there want to give some criticism?)
Her face was a revolution of color.
I miss the pits of her cheeks when she bared
her mad teeth in pleasant fits—yapping hysterics
when we used to somersault over each other at dawn.
Still, freckles glow brown on the white linen of her face,
stretched taut, nested in wrinkles. We used to be a family
of lionesses. Gold-haired goddesses. Our steaming breath
created desert winds. We stalked the rising dust, bodies
glaring with the sun’s reflection on sand. She was magic then:
birthed from the blistered eyes of Ra’s mother, but is now
red-faced, bone-skin and it-doesn’t-matter. I scorn
that humanity, her anti-hues. We could have destroyed
mankind—a salve for warrior hearts. I would have tangled
crowns of hot stars in our hair, danced with palms towards the sky—
until she grew drunk, spread lips open and closed:
a suffocating fish. I come home, curl alone on the carpet, itching
myself, the place she last touched me, with my hind legs.
Oh mother, my willful disease. I long to be
you as you were.
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i’m moving to france. i’m adopting a baby girl. we’re going to sit on colorful quilted blankets for hours with strawberry and mint ice cream and read winnie the pooh, where the wild things are, if you give a mouse a cookie… eee! babies!
