Poetry

Big Spring, Arrow Rock, MO The body records its absences. Water, you take waterinto it—as presence, as absence, deep into the archiveof water you throw your mask. Also, your other mask.We, being matter, are negotiated. I had not thoughtto be angry, as such. But rage flexes its majestic undoing,its sustaining negation. The reparations the body…

And when I awoke, I saw that I was gone. Just like that, the woman Ithought I knew, gone into the morning like the mockingbird’s song.After all these years, it was a bit of a surprise, even though I had seen itcoming, the way you see a train approaching from afar, crawling alongthe tracks, silent…

After Hadrian Go, little sister,Flesh-flap peeledFrom blistered heel, Yellow pellicleSkimmed with a forkOff scalded milk. Where will you go,How far on wind-whistleTo marrow within a creature Not yet bornWhen I become no longerYour bodied brother? Vanishing twin, forever young,No reason to mournAs worms unfasten my tongue.

—worth it?My soul looks back and wondershow I left behind   that tether, which, a burden so long,had become a life more truethan my memory of having been without it: a friend saying, “Ilove you, but not enough,” then nevertrying toward enough or letting me go. The soul says “Go” and I followthat voice offthe edgeless…

Objects heavy enough to break us hangfrom the thinnest of threads. A stray breezeand down they come. But they say that spider silkis five times stronger than steel, which might bewhy spiders look so buff. I know that I wouldn’twant to run into one in a dark alley, or any alleyfor that matter, though matter…

          Maybe on the shore of the lakewhere eagles live and breathe again,swooping over toddlers frightening all,I sought a rock that was flat,one to skip over the calm surface of the water to impress the child. And maybe the rock had fallen fromanother planet, tumbled, burned itself to a size human though still full of…