Breath Span

1.   Along with your ashes, the barely

written ones, obliterating

the ode, the incited roots, the alien

eye—with imbecilic hands, they dragged you

into the city, bound you in

this knot of slang, and gave you

nothing. Your ink has learned

the violence of the wall. Banished

by your brothers, you cant the stones

of unseen earth, and smooth your place

among the wolves. Each syllable

is the work of sabotage.

2.   Flails, the whiteness, the flowers

of the promised land: and all

you hoard, crumbling at the brink

of breath. For a single word

in air we have not breathed, for one

stone, splitting with the famine

inside us—ire,

out of bone’s havoc, by which we kin

the worm. The wall

is your only witness. Barred

from me, but squandering nothing,

you sprawl over each unwritten page,

as though your voice had crawled

from you: and entered the whiteness

of the wail.

3.   Scanned by no one

but the loved, the margins

rehearse your death, playing

out the travesty

of nakedness, and the hands

of all the others

who will see you, as if, one day

you would sing to them, and in the longer

silence of the anvil, name them

as you would this sun: a stone,

scourged by sky.

4.   Vatic lips, weaned

of image. The mute one

here, who waits, urn-wise,

in wonder. Curse overbrims

prediction: the glacial rose

bequeaths its thorns to the breath

that labors toward eye

and oblivion.

We have only to ready ourselves.

From the first step, our voice

is in league

with the stones of the field.

5.   The blind way is etched

in your palm: it leads to the voice

you had bartered, and will bleed, once again

on the prongs of this sleep-hewn

braille. A breath

scales the wick of my stammering,

and lights the air that will never

recant. Your body is your own

measured burden. And walks with the weight

of fire.

6.   Unquelled in the voiceless

hull, where seed ends, and augurs

nothing: you will plow

the choral rant

of deepnesses, and go the way

that eyes go. There is no longer

path for you: from the moment

you slit your veins, roots will begin

to recite the massacre

of stones. You will dwell.

You will raze

your house here—you will forget

your name. Earth

is the only exile.

7.  The dead still die, and in them

the living: all space,

and the eyes, hunted

by frail tools, confined

to their habits.

To breathe is to accept

this lack of air, the only breath,

sought in the fissures

of memory, in the lapse that sunders

this language of feuds, without which earth

would have granted a stronger omen

to level the orchards

of stone. Not even

the silence pursues me.

8.   The left hand locks the door.

The right hand pries a darkened stone

from this pyramid of seeds,

and all light

grows without us. From one word

to the next, the page is the heir

of desert: its distance

and obscenity, of which I am

the scribe,—and the shadow, stumbling

through this vast stone room,

where the darkness cures me

of my name.

9.   Rats wake in your sleep,

and mime the progress

of want. My voice turns back

to the hunger it gives birth to,

coupling with stones

that jut from red walls: the heart

gnaws, but cannot know

its plunder; the flayed tongue

rasps. We lie

in earth’s deepest marrow, and listen

to the breath of angels.

Our bones have been drained.

Wherever night has spoken,

unborn sons prowl the void

between stars.