Ok, it’s sunny, otherworldly, skin-tight
where we’re flabby and clouded over, pining away
under layers of jealousy, detachment, the compost heap
of the shucked and dismissed. Out of the bad deeds,
screeches in the arboretum, the wronged person
who circles the rotaries, the infidel
who torments her clitoris, the young man
who discovers he’s nameless,
muttering when he should be moaning, shattering
the window of opportunity because—I forget where
I was going with this—perhaps the baffling
cataclysmic lesions that scar us invisibly—
but I suspect, deep down, we’re a good people,
easily humbled: we implore, fill with worry,
we try to sing to loved ones, shadow
their wishes, color their hair as they fly
into the great nothing: no more, that’s it.
But we can only hold the shell of them,
get on our knees and scrub away
the whole heavy saga. In another world,
people would know exactly how bad we are,
how we seize a dance floor, how we shake
and sweat profusely, how we hum a few bars
through the dead spots, and since we have no idea
what comes next, we set the homestead
ablaze. We bargain, we finagle,
we comb the hair on the corpses, their beautiful hair.
from True FaithFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2012
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.