I’m tired, spent, a birth of the mind

that miscarriage of red rivers to dark dreams

those hallways, these hands.

always spent

climbing the air like a mad ghost with an ax. 

You

the person in my walls, your hidden limbs awkward under my dress.

I lie down in the yellow grass,

licking the stars.

the purple dust of night knows the song.

but you don’t. and these days don’t. and I am tired. 

and I’m afraid I’ll float away, terrified of my lightness,

a balloon in your hand that you can’t lace your fingers around.

I am a frustration. A taste in your mouth. 

The metal rivers in your wrists. 

I am tired, a broken spine tied to the dead tree. 

I am tired and I want to go home, 

this yawn, a hiccup, a swallow of wrong air. These walls are gray,

these days are fogs in empty boxes,

I must go in quiet. away away away

no one becomes an artist unless they have to. 

the body

I saw the body

In the black dirt,

A moon that had fallen

From the sky

And sprouted legs

And arms and long delicate fingers.

I saw the body in my dreams

Crushed up against

My eyelids like an egg shell

I saw the body

The splintered halves

Hidden through the drawers

The flesh laced over

The midnight trees

Like sheets of frost.

I saw the body

In his hands

Cupping the breasts

Slipping into the warm place

Where the soul

Hides.

The body

A house floating down the street

After the flood, wrapped in telephone wires.

The dead leaves down the river

The feathers in his mouth

Those limbs.

The body, without

Words or heart beat.

She was a woman

Who spun in circles

Did the dishes

Sighed in the dark

Listening to the snoring

Dreaming of the rifle,

The body wounds

To ribbons,

Unwraps.

To know the flesh like

A backwards code to the

Center. The universe

A giant lamp

On the body, the woman

That said goodbye,

Spit out her teeth

slipped off her arms like gloves,

Rode a dark dream that split the cells

And left her bones

In the dirt. 

Dissolving—
unwrapping the satin 
layers of shadows,
scraping off the bruises
like dark petals.
your breath in the center
seizing like a limp
moon, 
your hands a pair of confused wings
to obscure the light. 

To hide means to 
hold your breath and spin
in circles and count the odd numbers
where his hands plant between 
the white bulb, 
to your light

but you are not there at all,
dissolving neon threads
to the bottom of the dark sea.

without voice and joints
but a jellyfish curled in its
own poison-
silence in between his
hands. 

what is created cannot be destroyed
but recycles its breath against
the night sky, 
sea foam settling against the salmon light
for forgiveness. 

mermaid cries in the caverns 
where you spilled your secret
and let loose your neon
milk hair. 

corrodedvessel:

I wanted to fill my elegy with lights of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he’s dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history. So I began to think about history.

-Anne Carson, from Nox

When you travel away, maybe you have left the sink running. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night in your new home and you can still hear it. First it rises like a tsunami in your chest, and then settles like an itch you can’t find to scratch, like rain water whispering in your walls. It’s like an ocean leaking through a rusty old faucet, waiting for you to wash your hands or brush your teeth and rinse out your coffee cups. But your hands are old now, wrinkled and calloused. You place them on your cheeks and weep. Even when you are miles away, and years away, that house tucked under the thick blue sky of the South runs it’s rivers through your heart. You have to rise and go outside just to meet it in spirit. You have forgotten something, you left the water running. You forgot to say goodbye, you forgot to lay your stones and say I forgive you.