What wounds, what overgrown fields and blunted ploughs. What skies dangling with freefall of blasted birds. What broken shelves of mountains on which markhor have left behind their winter coats, their spiraled horns. What towns of smoke and elegy of 9 AM shadow. What strange noons of orange fog, an acreage of embers sparking into fire. The moon keeps a tally on its chipped marble whiteboard: each plank of hewn and stolen wood; each pod of pilot whales and porpoises, their effort to steer out of boiled saltwater to strand upon the coast. And you, mouth that did not eat of soups with sea-turtle eggs and pangolin flesh, that did not tear the joints off buttonquail roasted on bamboo spits, that did not dip a spoon into stews of elk— yet you dressed your skin in velvet and let them dwindle into abandoned shells, sink like rusted vessels. Always at dusk, the ancestors visit: their wings cleave air you find increasingly hard to breathe. What wounds, what fingerprints you’ve left on every surface: hard as diamond points, scattershot trails visible from thousands of miles above the earth. There’s only this moment. Don’t call on stars or meteors. Don’t speak just to speak.In response to Via Negativa: Unthinkability.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.