balmy rock
At the left ear of this body, the land lying stiff,
you find me, my hands thick with cerebral membrane.
In the country we inhabited, I am restoring,
trying to make it mine now you have left for good.
This is the spiral of love, built out of brain cells.
The salvage of you: your nose, your ear,
your lips quivering like a shoreline, your hands,
the site of an embrace I once shaped from clay.
A curtain falls behind that inner altar
where I was given over, marrying what you were.
Now I stand with dry, dusted hands in the skull,
remaking what we were in this deadened city,
this ruined site, this paradise undone.
The bells have fallen flat into the dirt.
No angel will ever answer.
I look into the gutted church of you,
what time has done to throne and chamber:
where you once sat, only dust and residue,
the trinity reduced to hollow vessels,
one cornucopia after another, emptied by war.
The lintels hold, but only just, bare concrete.
For years I have sat before your broken gates,
working through a stilted, patient ache.
You should see it now, this nearing deletion:
aqueducts in your image, severed limbs,
viscid mountain
plucky spear
raw turret
nimble yoke
desert mountain