Death's A Sad Bone

Since you ask,

most days

I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing,

unmarked by that voyage.

Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life. I

know well the grass blades you mention,

the furniture you have placed under

the sun.

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask

why

build.

Twice

I have so simply

declared myself,

have possessed

the enemy, eaten the enemy,

have taken on

his craft,

his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,

warmer than oil or water,

I have rested,

drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.

Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.

Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don’t always die,

but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet that even children

would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!— that,

all by itself, becomes a passion.

Death’s a sad bone; bruised,

you’d say, and yet she waits for me,

year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound,

to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,

raging at the fruit a pumped-up moon,

leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,

something unsaid, the phone off the hook

and the love whatever it was,

an infection.