june poem

Revamping an old prose poem.



Letter for your dying

            I want to make you understand how the natural collects the divine.

You cannot see it, and so I will show you.

This is the evolution of proper noun to something more tangible. Your desperate chromosomes shying through goodbyes… the condensed cadence of your breath, of water slipping through fingers. Your frame reminds me of husked coconut, of the startling juxtaposition between flesh and meat, of what is seen and what is valued.

It is a beautiful and simple thing. There will be no elaborate transition–no Egyptian severance of body from soul. It will take four minutes for the air to leak from your lungs, like a chimney bleeds spring-smoke. A skin-slacking canvas will spread from tooth to toe, the story writing itself on your body: legible as braille, as etchings in stone, as Morse code. When your spirit departs, it will be through the pores. It will be from under the fingernails, or the tongue. The process is less like a parade down a crowded street towards the sea, and more like the froth of fresh, escaped champagne. No time is lost. There is no time to lose.

Dusk is breaking against the horizon, and slowly retreating into the ground. Dye does this below wet looms. Moss does this to the rocks it consumes, and barnacles to their ships. Quietly, they steer—navigating past all rough patches. They eat and eat and eat. The direction of consumption controls the Earth. You will become an impossible litany of eaten things because that is the only choice that anyone has; no choice at all. Oceans and ashes and fires and flies: all they ever do is stumble and rattle about, blindly consuming.

Osmosis will allow the rain into your soft bed-bones. You will be the most beautiful and exotic biome. The most ornate empire abandoned; enzymes having collapsed upon themselves after a century of making. All bodies lose the war, and want to lose it. They sap themselves dry, scream until raw, and whittle their maps down to dust.

The clouds eke and fade with brilliance. I am reminded of veins easing radiance out of the heart, pushing it toward the extremities. Somehow, you fray there like a palace’s worn carpet: inexplicably regal. This is a dance entrenched in the feet from birth—evidence that a body can so thoroughly forget and remember at once. It is a wonder. Your unbecoming is by far the most becoming of selves, and I am a small, jealous bird building a nest of your dying. Singing a song of it in my brittle bones that seek to articulate so much, but only ring of wind.

I am so sorry, and yet so full. In moments like this, no one breathes—we wait to be breathed, and that is enough to sustain us.

Decompress. All I really know, all I can really promise you, is that you are no longer uppercase.