The Color of Bodies Along the Tongue of the Sea
“yielding a world that would turn in on itself like an ouroboros”― Benjamín Labatut
I
We neighborhood cities with damp voices, flag memory
as it flutters along streams of streets, lost balloons ripened
over water the way steam rattles its teeth in the jaws of a pregnant kettle
echoes poke beneath feet and undress palimpsests of others
scratches trample a squeak in the dark
tattered over
storms sweep away the evening prayers finger-poked
entangled by a once fitful child, still
words linger along the spine backward until they are
warmed, de-boned and fed long after into
what remains
the bitten smile of the sky’s dark, the mourning eyes made slender by touch
the squawk vowel in the squeak of the morning’s opal clawing from trees
palm fronds fall in a tropical storm against the evening’s breviary
our vices picked over a strewn blanket, finger spidering a thread on the lining’s
swath of silk, the air made slender as a poem born of the light
from the death of distance stars’ language
in a cosmic dust wormholing us, we fall through words
II
In the hospital, you sketched a child’s drawing of my heart, a trembling line wiggled nervously in the shape of a mitral valve between the heart’s chambers, mitral regurgitation you said gone wrong and now gone black, the valve necropsied, swinging like an old pasture gate gone old and hanging by a rusted nail, swaying over the cavern below held into the right chamber’s branches, blood and stringy tissue only, ‘we must operate or you will most certainly die’ ‘in how long’, ’24 to 36 hrs’
life, dependent on a mechanical tissue constructed in a lab, now I too, like so many, a descendant of Dr. Charles Hufnagel’s genius, skin and blood, on went the swinging gate, one goes the stops, the rise and plummet of this miracle, alchemy and I the genie resurrected, so
let this spinning world go long, let the light and shadows dance in the genius of tropical light, let the heart peel underneath a canopy of spiky fronds, let you be you, and our organs anew, shelter and alight, palmed beneath the southern hope the Greeks once name long after the indigenous families knew above us teeth in the black sky, constellations inverted in the marbles of an eye, let your heart ring out like an old Ford, the line on that bed-side paper drawing a 427 cubic inch big block V8, meter rusted into essence and name, a valve named love, let the darkness bellow bow, let the river cast its reflection upward, we invert, we tug the stars down, tug them down, the dead and the long ago, the river around the bend, name it yours;
let the speculum mark you out, grappling the long past meadow that meandered from the cypress and mango swamps, gator and colt, the falling fruit and the penumbra of torment, dreaming beneath arbor, wayward seabirds stretch above a brutal sea, the pelican’s song caught in your hair, its prey falls from its mouth from greed, the dampness of death in the rhyme;
this shimmering loss, name it, comb it into life parted at the crease, knife it, score it into moment of cloud-clubbed syllables echoing in the tunnel of the tin can on the porch, kicked, your breath rolled step-by-step over blueprint plans and cheap wood, a torn sneaker orphaned in the backyard, your mother took care of the family names she’d once toss out the highway window and now their echo clubs down the steps, lobbed like diamonds or a grenade, in the dying dust you trip, fall then awake, your shoes still on, the tin can now gone, the grandparents, aunts and uncles and a young cousin now dead, August caught in the weeks when grief knew its path home, until years later you too returned from the dead, you know;
now we dine in the snow on tears in a northern storm, this is the way language goes.
III
somewhere in the distance a boy curls himself upon a beach
awkward the disappearing
his smile the lightness of a bridge in the afternoon green
over the land shadow-run currents buster and wrack over rock
and the world never looked so bright
eyes open, he dreams dreams come quick as swallows drive above
in murmuration onder the swift sharp turns
love untangles and his body swerves
you are now, yes you are, sharpened, awake and galloping home.
