SOON A HATCH WILL OPEN & A MAN WITH A GUN WILL ASK WHY YOU’RE NOT A MAN
Often on your way home, there’s a woman
in a lavender blouse carrying groceries,
or a taxi driver learning the streets
like his convalescing wife’s ribs,
& often school’s letting out
its pollen of mouths singing, “I want
nothing. I want nothing.”
& beyond the internet’s black dress of infinite interior monologue,
frost crusts maple leaves
& the sea deep in its away begins the weather to end us:
A telephone pole reads: Do not leave
kids unattended in this wind.
The weather grows like a black lilac. Someone hurt someone.
It all began on tv. The man with the gun will tell you to behave.
You ask the gun which country it’s from. From the heart
land, it says. I don’t make the rules, it says.
You don’t know anyone. You don’t know your crimes,
but a man in a suit of blood comes to tell you
who’s won, how winning is done. It doesn’t matter what you did,
that your daughters braided each other’s hair
like sheaves of cinnamon, that your wife slept
against your left arm on the couch, her breath
a valance around you, that you never finished
raking the leaves.
You could give a speech. He’d like that.
You could say you don’t deserve this. He’d say who does.
The light asks for your soliloquy, its hunger a bladed pendulum,
a burnt village. In the background, someone is watching
reruns. You take off your jacket to wait in this shared pornography.
You don’t remember being human, holding your voice
in a time without a savior. You remember only a mountain buried in your chest
& then removed. There are, you recall, mountains burning in the news,
a fire-wounded forest, its sacrificial smoke rising to touch rare birds
who live thinly between fact & myth, who rise, winged, as if to be prayed to,
as if to rule without laws.
