1Dry is safeness. This is all
it's ever been.
I poured away your body into a pail. It is without its shovel.
Leg without arm, it is still the same body that was cutting my hair in the bathtub last week.
Your same veined hands
and the you that was telling me about ambience,
the flux of a godless room, the with and without that sounded like metal rust,
like clanging, like unfilled treasure boxes and the dizziness of yielding Earth to ground—to itself—
to go back to the stolen niche of our birthplace, to your elbow in my hips,
my laughter on one thigh,
(our mother.)
Yellow, I say, give me this morning—this morning about building houses,
about overbuilding them, about leftovers and wreckage
from where we drew in the sea and the waves and waves and waves
of whittled white bones
and us
carrying between our first fingers all the ways our youth
was worn out beneath roofs.
(Rogues, goners, pints of blood. We are irreversible. I know
all skeletons are from wombs, all skins from another that we watched grow ourselves. So there is
no going back. In our lives, we've never gone to wanting.)
The circle drawn out of chalk is still here in the living room. It's a place we don't go to. It's the one thing
we're afraid of the most, where we tossed ourselves headfirst into the tiles and
snatched, and
stole.
Lying on the bed
on a Thursday afternoon,
you'd say: it's not stolen if we stole it from ourselves. This is ours. It is ours. Here is ours,
ours.
(No matter, in my remaining daylights, I rearrange our bones.
Smallest to biggest. You to me, then me to you. And I dreamt of the bruiser
who smashed the windows, his own fists the same surface flecked with sin-lights, and that was you;
that was you, too.)
Over time and someday you'll end up in front of the gates again.
Big white ones without the lions, those ornaments of gold. I know you wouldn't
be ready to go. It's in your pauses. It's in your blinking. Everywhere—darling, your lost town,
your mornings—
I love.
I love.
(Yet I think, yet I don't think
our bodies will ever be reused
all that it can be.)