So say these rooms are darker
than you remember, these distances
between bones, so deceiving,
the syntax of castanets at the windowsill
swell all the cells with silk,
my body sun burnt
and translucent as moth wings,
bring the viral inconsistencies in the sternum
to anchor my reddened limbs
into the desperate ***** of the heart...
Where I gather milk and moonlight
at night, the phantom
tantra of your lips, open
my mouth as deliberate
as the throat swollen with rain,
remembers how your kiss
takes to cold, at the collarbone,
something slender and unlaced,
your mouth, a length of silver chain
wound about the impossible symmetry of my dress
made entirely of vowels,
dried roses caught in its hem,
baby's breath tangled and dangling from my hair...
See how the body becomes an apology,
bending into an alabaster suicide,
its entreaties carved into the heart,
in the tar at my shoulders,
and now, how the fibula splits open,
feathered, I am this dark seed across a canvas,
a furthering, azaleas harboured
in the languid anklebone, and sudden water
gathers at my hem, bears the scent of hurricanes
and lilies, all this mayhem in the cells,
begin to loosen its wreckage, the rough
of your hands, river-wild and dark,
cool against my cheek, the ropes
of your arms bind the moment, opaque,
and I lose my way among the hours,
dimly lit through the damask curtains,
the windows are veiled by a steady rain,
and in my famine, I swallow enough of this gin
to drown, the dark collects in my mouth,
as the muslin flesh presses the seams of my dress
in blackened promises, of milkweed and almonds...
Thursday, at last,
and there are sonnets in my hair,
these hours are so rare, the indigo
in our roses spread like bruises,
as you weave poetry into the hemp of a collar,
my wrists, all Indian burns and snakebites,
snap beneath the jungle gym
where lilacs burst against the barbed fence,
the light swallows the seconds
and how my face is hollowed by shadow,
moths beating themselves, merciless
against the porch light, as you still, your body
listens to the gentle burning in my bared forearms,
the taste of copper, the risk
of skinned knees that bleed
in the lull of nightfall,
when I begin to braid
my daughters hair, fireflies
in a glass jar, at the panes, dizzy
and wanting, whisper their pale accusations,
left scrawled in the margins,
in a drier season, I tear out
the furious passages of my body,
and survive solely on ritual milk baths,
as lips allow in a liquid innocence,
though it takes more than this to drown,
the giving in, a tangle of amber braids
in the undercurrents, there is a gentle tedium
to my hair between your fingers, my throat
beneath your thumbs, a thickening
of immaculate tethers to bind the seizures about your lap,
the octaves tremor, like cicadas,
all those days in the ground, the damp wrinkle
of their wings, years I have been hiding
the bones in the words, as the syntax
of sorrow and jazz darken the windows of this room,
on a day that can go no further....
