Fall

The sound of the rake against

the pavement moves me to the window.

I examine the crooked bones,

follow them down

to forgotten flesh, which builds below.

The remaining flesh slowly forgets how to ache,

what colors are, how to access memory.

I’m attending a memorial service –

bags line our streets like lies

to be taken away by familiar strangers. I could make a song out of you.

We decompose; sentences disintegrate into silent earth, fall under snow –

oceans we find inside ourselves daily

wash away; too much of a tide pulls

the curtain across inside-eyes.

We no longer see in speech

the way we had conceived.

Discoveries

Body is not like paper, tape, a vegetable or protein.

Body is not against body. Body does not want body to slip.

Mouth is not part of body? Mouth sweeps body out from under itself, like brain.

Brain removes self from body by defamiliarization and or deconstruction or and destabilization and or disassociation and or depersonalization.

Wholeness implies fragmentation.

Splits become inevitable when brain-body parts are seamed together in the fragmented moment.

When goatskin is used to patch up body parts, they get especially brainy and subject to fragmentation.

Roadkill body rediscovers and must reinvent and bind body. Body feels used, scraped, and betrayed by brain for brain said body was in a safe place.

When goatskin covers body’s eyes, the smell of fresh rosemary will wake brain from illusion. Memory must be reenvisioned.

Illusions and discoveries such as roadkill and goatskin, among other moments bury body continually in dirt past.

Dirt past is made of sticks, dirt, moss, stones, decongesting body, decomposing body, decompressing body. To dig through dirt past and present will tire brain/body.

Digging through dirt past and present hardens body, polishes brain.

Brain/body communicates brilliantly, shines like a spotlight, illuminating parts of brain/body that fell through fissures.

Here’s to a newly stimulated present,

Every room loaded with sunken syllables,

Every sentence like a bank

Of canons washed green with the past,

Shelled by the sea and the once-

Slave castle’s whispers

Like wine slivering throats.

Become draft

I took a wolf spider in for my own,

named it and watched it grow,

as I used to watch caterpillars;

I wished to behold metamorphosis.

I would adore each furry individual in one form

climbing up netted walls or my finger, in another

still as the twig it rested its naked body from, and finally,

as it emerged, abandoning the chrysalis,

just another grave. I longed for that state

as a child, to hibernate and then become.

I waited in my eggshell

and ate bones, attempting to harden.

Bones turned to rusty steel and my eyes

fell into the bank of the river searching

for a relevant undertow.

Was it a mistake? Crawling into the graves

might have been easier, more restful

I could've found the dirt blanket,

tucked myself in like the earth

I knew I was.