In the Shadow of the Emperor's Malady
Mors certa, vita incerta
“Normal led to this.” — Ed Yong, essay in The Atlantic Magazine
Minuet
the horizon like a finger of wet chicory, the lift of language ballasted by the curve of the land along the sea’s long liquid neck, there we go, swift the sound of scattering wings clipping the space between a window and the far-lost long-ago opening through which you once pulley’d down the sky, a kite of birds and telephone line, a canopy of songs and a flock of flapping good-byes, stories you once held against each other, page by page, lip to lip, palm to palm, sibilant to fricative, heart to heart, life to life, eclipsing
light awakens the bruised trees rising in your arms the father than folded in your arms before the coffin unlocked
spring rises in the arms of your beloved, trees whose frail limbs crack in the wind beneath the wait of May and machine
is the world unkempt in this long unfolding or something else, perhaps time’s dna or our losses or maybe simpler, a verb conjugated
us
