From “Post-Identity”

I was light from the mouth from every part of me
I was of the earth or a scar in the earth rent through
the ruins of late civilization and bubbled from it and
became a saint’s reptilian spirit and I could taste
the wheat and coal and gold like a trinity of bounty
and I was vapor like a smog that becomes a wraith
over the city then back to its animal form decompressed
and atomized into its past life as star and I was that animal
truth the spirit I had dreamt about being more cloud
and star then given I was just the density of water
a reciprocity in and out the fade of my fugitive
substance going south and the yearn for decadence
disappears in the annals yet leaves a taste in the mouth
metallic and lime the sense of dissolution and I was speed
and insistence to reset the orb of gravity I was risen from foam
necessitated by colony sired in violence exported as luxury

Credit

Copyright © 2017 by Carmen Giménez Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 13, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“This poem is an excerpt of a long lyric poem inspired by Whitman, Neruda, spoken word, and the lyric range of Alice Notley. This particular excerpt considers how organisms and systems collide.”
—Carmen Giménez Smith