The Dark Clicks On

EVERY RIVEN THING


“Those blessed to survive wrote their poetry
not after such experiences but in their aftermath”
-Carolyn Forché


I don't even know where it hurts anymore.
My wounds have floated off into other bodies
and stuck there like wings in an updraft.
I have nothing to point at and say:
it's not as if falling is something new.
Pain without mark is someone in the dark
with an ax to part one side of the heart from the other:
that elegant focus of prey in the brush.
None of the maps I've drawn for myself
are permanent—not even those
on the gaunt of my neck or in
the white mains of my wrists. How can I
possibly rate the pain without a scar or a cyst?
Something snagged in the Bronx on a knife or a curb?
I am quiet without cuts.
My bones go on reaching.
I am a witness day after day in the same body
and the new pain is a twist in the stark,
a whole grain groan, purely
representational blood-spatter:
the best I can do is some ribbon and rafters.
I tell you, the universe is a scratch,
and faith is a rape kit,
and that hand on your back is to keep
you buckled over on the side of the road.
It's only sore here: around that spot
you just left, leaving light and some cloth,
the space for a scar,
a stasis to be stitched up, a zone
to be nursed nightly into bleeding.



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WILD FIRE


The kingfishers catch fire—
they bring their wings against a scarred-up canopy.
Every hut is a thatch of matches and
economy of common howls.
The heart, lately,
distrusts the brush.
The forager steps out into the open
to be shot, sought, and shrugged of guts.
Note the fiery finches,
the brave albatross of white ash,
the doves detonating in the aftermath
like thuds you thought were dead.
The trees talk of toppling.
The bees stride in with sulfur and a little sugar.
Dredge the spring-flood lake
for some bulk, some weight
to push and drag ashore.
On what do the cougars depend?
On a trace? A flap and fleck of blood?
Bone aborts awfully in the canyon.
Fire approaching the open hand
perks and goes on pecking.
What shoves over the trees
are viable white birds.
What the cougars eat
are the tart hearts of trackers.
I'm so close I can see
the soft, brown genitalia
of the deer as I run them over,
slashing and lighting up the night,
as if I had a thousand
more of them.



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