I asked to be made in the image of the Lord,
as an ode to a god I’d forgotten.
I paled like a throat of birch.
I paled at the thought of such fast wings.
I preferred the god of beating to the god
of flightless limbs. I chipped bit by bit
at the bones of this until I had a voice to take me
by the hand. I preferred the god of fragments.
Each small animal fallen wild. What I thought
was cold cried in the night like an abandoned well.
Snow falling not far from here, the verb of
what will listen. The cold stretch of terrace
in the moon. Away where evening sings
its wet leaves clustered like flint, its font
an insomnia from which we crack, its retinas
as clock-beautiful as logic. I remembered the name
of the closeness of dark, its carriages rolling
back through time to yoke the ghosts of oxen.
I could see its cry already like a weapon at the anvil,
its stethoscope that cannot find the heart.
Already have an account? Log in
Join KR for even more to read.
