Underwater

I wake up with the water over my eyes
And the sun in the ceiling is distorted
Five feet and thirteen months away

I would reach for it, but
The distance between my brain and finger
_             tips is
_                        even further
And thought falls short of feeling,
Underwater

And it’s not cold                                                                 [bracing]
And it’s not hot                                                                          [boiling]
And it’s no thing                                                                             [I tell myself]

It’s lighter than the air that leaves my lungs

And the words that would
And t whisper
Over my tongue are just
_                                                                                               please
_                                                                       don’t
_                                                                                                                        I love you
Air bubbles
That fail to break the surface

 

And it’s thicker than the blood that circles my veins

A muted marching beat that drums out
_         empty orders
_                   the coronary choral that
Nearly, almost, not-quite,
_                                             Inspires

And the day marches past,
_                                               past
_                                                       the state lines of my mind that
Delineate nothing

And faces blur soft to warbled support
While white teeth dissipate in time
Reaching me in scattered fragments of a smile – like sound
In the distance; the hollow cannon cry
_                           of a hand on the shoulder
_                           again

And sometimes the weather changes;
Just enough
_                    to let the water dip
_                                                       uncover my nostrils and lips
Rampant, a storm squall of oxygen
Trickles down to
_                             burn my throat

But before I can choke
I let the water rise again

Swallow

She limped back to us,
I guess
With withered wings and a stolen voice
From a trap of smog, and glass
From a cloud drifting dark
In neon skies

And she slept for a week;
Sought out a cage
Because her safety lay
Beyond the bars she could not play for us

And

She cannot bear to speak
Though salt burns through me
At the touch of her song

And she cannot bear to spread those wings
Like she once did
Before the summer she went away
Or the autumn where we still wait
To see if she came back

Her song is not a sad one,
I think
Though she shows me the sorrow she keeps
In the box without a key,
Locked away beneath her bed
Along with her voice

No, her song is not a sad one
For she spent her sadness weeks ago
Instead she fills it with broken pieces
A dozen different jigsaw symphonies
To lay down at my feet
For mercy, or understanding
To take that melody away

And those nights alone she prayed,
I know
Until her lungs whispered empty
And the taste, the rasp of eulogy
Left poison in her mouth
And iron in her wings

I never learned what she prayed for, no
And I never asked who she prayed to
Or the nameless things that left her
To shut her eyes and
Swallow her voice

But ghosts and scars and feathers
Crawl across her skin
And her story plays itself out
In red and white
In the track of an old key
Along the length
Of her thigh

And I watch through curtained lids
The quicksand quake of lips long shut
The tremble of pearl, bleeding silver and salt
The droop of the wings in her
Hummingbird heart

Though my fingers still
And do their best to hear
The ballad she carved out of herself