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RAG SMELL. FIRE smell. Bed blacked. Bowl.
The quiet come from living done.
Shadow built the walls, holed and cribbed with light.
Vine felt cracks and fingered in.
Were sky inside
and what the wind-holes left, a wind.
Ay walk the last. What were floor
heaves rock and root.
Flame-eaten walls, rubs of wood,
scraps the burn left licked
now licked with dirt.
Copyright © 2012 by Joan Houlihan. Used with permission of the author.
Your scrunched eye seizes, sizes
me up: pulley-roped palliatives, craft and lies.
Washing my hands in the back, I wonder:
what's a good death?
Of course you held on and I held on to you.
We had married ourselves to a trance.
This is regret: or a ferret. Snuffling,
stunted, a snout full of snow.
As the end of day shuffles down
the repentant scurry and swarm—
an unstable contrition is born.
Bend down. Look into the lair.
Where newborn pieties spark and strike
I will make my peace as a low bulb
burnt into a dent of snow. A cloth to keep me
from seeping. Light crumpled over a hole.
Why does the maker keep me awake?
He must want my oddments, their glow.
All halted elegance, you make a paper wolf for me then blow into a bottle for the howl. We are so merry in the belly of July, knees pressed together, kissing as we eat, while west, in Gran Dolina, the intact skeletons are spread with tools around a cold hearth. Trouble yourself: they are deformed by a hammering for marrow along the longer bones, and on the templar, blackened. When man is a study of cut mark and fracture, woman should be wary. I am not. Cloud-tails float high, uncombed, as I, with found weed braided simply in my hair, lean to your mouth.