EXIT INTERVIEW
This is about failure but let’s pretend
it’s the rain that fixes us here
stamping our feet in this gulag
of a month. Let’s pretend the moon
isn’t the sky’s scar tissue.
Let’s pretend the artifact
of our breath will remain
obedient, not like a good dog
licking the deep salt
from your hands, but like
a robot or a butler,
or in a better world than this one,
a robot butler. Let’s say
it was summer
and the world
became a lurid green
and all we could
do to survive was darn the socks of tyrants
in a cave beside
the green murmur of the sea.
What would it mean
turning to you
in the night
disguised in the milk light of the moon?
To your throat
I would press
my lips like a voided stamp.
You could never return me.
If this life is
the only one,
it will not be so hard to love ashes before salt.
To always ache.
3 comments:
Hi Paul,
I stumbled on your site and must tell you I am very much enjoying your work. Do you like Davis McCombs? Something about your work makes me think of him. I heard him read last year at a UK Symposium. Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver also read. It was quite an enjoyable evening. Here's a McCombs piece for you from his book Ultima Thule:
Star Chamber
Once, the Doctor spoke to me at length
of stars and prognostications, how,
when we observe the waxing of the Moon,
everything cognate to her nature-marrow
in bones and in trees, flesh of the river
mussel-increases also. He told of tides
and how the ocean is affixed as with a chain
to moonlight. I think it must be different
in the Cave, where no light penetrates.
There, I have lost hours, whole cycles of the Sun.
At Star Chamber, I control the spheres-
a lantern hung just-so will produce the night sky
as if seen from a gorge; wobble it, and a comet,
smoky, pestilent, streaks across the Ether.
It didn't format correctly, but you can look him up if you like him and read it in the correct format.
Again, I really enjoy your work!
Annie in cloudy KY
Hi Annie. Glad you enjoy my work. I do like Davis McCombs a lot.
Take care.
It actually did format correctly. Yipee!
:)
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