Black Dahlia
“It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.”—Calvino
I awoke
to a life punctured from a canister of somnambulant dark
and spooled toward the sprocket of an iris
scissor'd and washed in a high-key tone of apertured light.
And I waited and I waited
until that moment when the day's dew got all chewed up
from the laughter of a young boy's braiding of air
rubber-glued gums and pocket of Tums,
swing blade school books and squinting, pulchritudinous looks,
and his howl upon the discovery left me more bare.
Do you remember?
That.
When the world, so it seemed at the time, pulled together
to pull me apart,
leader from that dented canister,
awakened to the news, all that was left of me seemed more syllable than sense: ligature and carapace and my, or was it your, caliginous sight.
Oh, blessed you, To be reborn.
To be re-birthed
this second sight and second life wrung more from a raddled rung
more eye than an alibi of investigative formulae. So there.
Call it what you will.
The luminous turned blue and black.
The space distanced through incremental pace.
The meter read wrong, the poor call, the note-dropped letter, the going
and the coming and the yet.
The steady hopping of a once-confident life
now gathered from the loam of a field now lent out to button clickers and scribblers
and some such.
Is that what I have become?
You, who have read of me.
You, who have thought of me.
You, who have dreamed and vanquished me
between the dog-eared, damp pulp of all those pages.
Of whose life? Anyway.
Not mine.
Swift-tumbling through family albums, family-less—
rocky shores of the streets of LA, El Paso and the wintery coasts of Ireland
constellations of the bruises on my skin and life and tongue traded in a fool’s bargain of words’
small buoys in the Chesapeake—all channel markers, all.
The discarded parts of my self, the throated words that only he heard as I left this world
through Knife and Drum Beat, and Sweat Lodge things left draining on the sidewalk,
Lumped on the floor, sprayed across the grassy and vacant patch of land behind the freeway and shopping wall, the cars bleeding like sheep in their passing,
The drunken girl on the tram who noticed me shrinking from the loss of blood.
In those moments, I thought of my nephew, two months ago giddy
explaining the meeting of some work of his called Wan Li , 10,000 英里.
The distance of my death to the sea, the distance of your heart to mine, the distance of the earth to the dipping constellations overhead.
And I broke, and bent forever the last moment of my body and mind,
ear toward the murmur of the concrete and grass which my tongue and head bowed toward
who can know when and why these rhythms erupt...sprouting in cycles,
the moon and the glade....
moonbeams in the morning that turned the blood of night in a flowering.
Your parting into color resplendent.
The light reborn from the perfidy of the night
Tooth-heart, tangled up and clicking.
Where am I?
In fact:
Was that me
Lain shorn in an empty block of abandoned dust and detritus?
Cloven for your gaze and rent.
In that calculus, the one you seem to recall, the pulling of selves apart into one:
Is that it? Is that what you taught.
Me.
Not the me in the field of darkness. Nor the me of the celluloid.
The me in the field of what you imagined, conjured and later re-built.
This second life, now.
The one no longer beginning nor ending though a more-fevered breath--
a palimpsest that cannot arrest
merely attest to all that which
lay lost on that vacant sprat of grass and dirt, the sight the light the indignant flight
toward you
my keeper and writer at night.
So what shall we do with all this?
Put those pieces together and rattle them in a drawer.
When you fish for your morning socks, that lint and bone rattling will be me
if even if even if even,
I remain for you shorn.
I remain for me whole.
Because you taught me the all of that.
Yes, I awoke in that place and from that discarded space
not an unglued whole
but a joined self because of you,
concomitant as a vowel pressed against the back of the throat
in the exhalation of a stretched thought.
Listen, can you audit that.
Not the I but a gathering, the doubled lettered pronoun and syllable made single.
We.
Who awoke.
Do you see that?
How then to remind the vacant lot and shuffled field of the same?
How then,
How then to recall or to abacus our way things.
I died that day, but I did not depart.
Do you understand this?
Do you understand this?
