BOOK OF SAND: volume 1
“We are an echo that runs, skittering,
Through a train of rooms.”—Czeslsa Milosz
i
you rescued me from the lumber, sand and swamp and lead me on the run from the ghosts and my watery self.
and death approached us, the weight of our blue depth, and we dared
because mama challenged us with spoon and spanner and all manner of kitchen utensil
and we grew limb-soft and lost
and we missed the algebra theorem chewed upon at noon:
thus, we have not understood yet enough what was our effort,
racing reckless toward something ineluctable, something the ocean might call home
and we swam and sifted along the surface waving all our brave things, dove.
and that is what the ocean called, pulling against the weedy, slick breath,
sailors lost under a cold pillow of airlessness and seaweed serpents strangling.
Brave that.
ii
once we galloped against one another in the backseat of your father’s car,
humidity as kiss, falling stars as buttons uncurled separated and your breasts awoke
beneath the tremor of my unbuckled hope
and in the night we learned more of ourselves than all those drive-by starts charting mythology
and rocket launches
and we trapezed the fear and broke our lives toward the light,
mountain, macadam, deer leaping in the ditch and our syllables as awkward as our fingers.
every lit window dampened by our breath and how many of us
how many of our bodies caresses the moon with our moonshine desire and goodyear losses.
Ask the bootlegger and the apples trees listening upon the holler.
iii
a god’s drunken smile burns and shelters like a sun,
the woman said on the porch in South Carolina, white as wicked bone,
as she recounted her pecan pie sitting on the window sill and all those boys
that once wrecked their bodies and heads for a beautiful photograph of a beautiful woman
and she sees right through them, and burned her love into them.
you too?
still rocking in her chair like a broken wall clock, she asked:
are strong enough to light through the red dark
iv
cicadas, their hum and shells on the trees of you sister’s man’s backyard,
hung unglued like that boy’s shoes, used in the poetry he wrote before he leapt off the bridge,
his body taken far along the pebbled river banks before it got all swung-up in the netting
and the story telling of the fisherman in the low country,
death for their poetry, death for the names that get passed on,
the down-country scrimshaw along the planks, boards and railing:
once that bridge carried more than a man’s body beneath but the promise of love,
the hum and heft of the shells on trees,
you heart dear south a beautiful typhoon:
a winging cicada.
Do lok tin si,
fallen angels spread wide like the black sea spreading its wing against the city night lights,
upturning like a bat batting left from a cave, the smallness of the players losing
their lives, the wrenches clacking in her suit pockets, the hearts of the girls they stole kisses from in the dawn
and the ghosts waving to the hills’ darkness and the tables gambles.
…alas, they were, but not for long.
