22 April 2016

drift

and i was picking pieces of myself
off the sidewalk
because there was no one there
to do it for me or to watch,
or to listen to the gulls screaming
carrion cries fighting over what bits of me i
missed:
a thumbnail here, or a
knucklebone bleached white
since morning, or a
hair, a tooth, a stone.
as the day frothed its last
against the shore, beating itself red
against the stalwart waves,
the impotent assemblage
groaned and cracked
and took up her place,
breathed a sodden, brackish breath:
asking where had the time gone,
and could we get it back,
and would it ever be possible
to sleep
without falling apart
in the meantime?

05 April 2016

and who shall follow after?

there's a place for the women like us
somewhere by the red rocks and the sea
where the breeze tangs of iron and salt
and the waves move more slowly in
the mornings.

there's a place set aside for the people like us
forged half from truth and half from fiction,
braced against the cliff where the seabirds nest
in great exposed stone catacombs ripe with
lichen and ossifying urea.

i stand with my toes hanging off the edge
where solid ground gives way to pure horizon,
waiting for what i know only in the unknown:
fathom only in the faceless forms of mythic artifact.

i will hear my calling once i have moved
beyond befores and afters, beyond the sweet
and terrifying certainty of now, or of then, or then.
when i am myself subsumed into the uncouth wind,
stripped of physic consciousness, borne upon
the biting, crafty wind,

only when i reach this formidable Beyond,
our febrile Eden will begin to grow
within what's left of me.
our ferocious, indeterminate Eden--
glutted on blood and lymph and
lachrymal distillations--
will reach Before every before,
and After each and every after,
and rescue us from ourselves
and from each other.

i stand with my toes hanging off the edge
of a cliff ever dropping clean and quick
into the sea. i take each step back, and i realize
that i am content to wait
for inspiration. i realize
that i am content to lay myself
before the reddening sun, the composite moon.

someday i will sing your song
to the stones and the waves.
today i am content to listen
as you sing to me.