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ANTIDOTE

There is a moment and there is a singing
bird and both are brutal
in this green, in this animal air.
You asked what might call
halt to the tender world,
the world like the pink white skin
beneath a scarlet scab,
and you asked it all in measures of breath.
But you were not singing.
And if you spoke at all,
if your mouth made more
than a bee’s fleshy hum,
I will never remember it all.
Maybe it was your hand,
vein-rooted, your skin tamped down
so close to the floating bones
I have always been alarmed
for them. Like crayoned eggs.
Like the fragile air
one dreams for his child
when the street seems scented
by sulfur. I stood there
and let the morning seduce me,
the lie of that day, that
invidious instant,
that story framed with moonbeam
in a jellied sky. To what
end did I speak
to each absent ear?
The first five songs made no sense at all.
But you cannot claim iotas
of surprise. If you live,
if the collaboration
of each threaded nerve
with each marbled muscle
served to bring you here
in the hall of your voice,
then you understand.
And this is how my body began
to know love. In the dark, the stolen darkness.