Originally published in New England Review. Volume 40, Number 4, 2019.
It seems there will be life
after you. A morning.
Night doesn’t stop the sun
from his urge to lift up
and end her. The moon,
however,
is coerced
out of flood. Water chamber.
Paper skin, the blister
remembers and scars.
When you left, I swallowed
a planet in the shape of a pear
and kept it
in my chest to grow
and green. Each sleep
it ripened with the swell
of my breath. Tropic
of Cancer. The rain happens
on the window
slow, in small, repeating
deaths. When Spring
came, the Ether morning
opened motion on me.
Dew. I have known
the diadem of stars
the Diviner keeps at home.
I was the girl
who braided grass blades,
making crowns
in the lawn. I knew you
when you were still
a small boy. King
of copper wire
and cigarettes and
broken things.
But don’t we grow. I know
how the buck turns
from a fawn. Monarch of Weeds.
Laurels of wilt. The crescent
sheds its antler self
to become nothing at all.
I know the sunrise
and I know the facts.
The branches of each lung
and capillary of the heart
bend like wheatgrain
giving to a breeze.
The seasons in us
that the cancer relieves.
Sweet half moon
shows only half her heart,
an onion bulb underneath.
Your plant-flesh leans
its rays to heat: a bent neck
for your disease.
You do not go, old Cobalt.
The Empress keeps dressed
in her pomegranate robes.
The wild engine of
your body remains
on and on. No, you stay
and I will go.
Blues moan and sing it:
Enough of this. This
apocalypse, this exorcism
dawn. This undone
tulip, cracked /
what moves along.
What moves inside
of me. What stops.
The rest of the moon
is gold and its top
cut off.
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