Has no kinsmen & Earthenware more porous than metal, absorbs particles of the flesh
by Kimberly Burwick
[ poetry - december 02 ]
Has no kinsmen
Now, from this gurney, the coronal sutures snapping
one by one,
the cruel unlearning of the word
November
as beads of sweat align themselves every time I raise my head to try
your first name for the first time
again. The temptation to be packed in and taken
like the others,
finger to finger,
waist to waist the spoil
of urine and hard candy corroding
the stitches of your youngest brother's pants
at a time when the autumnal blush of winter's arrival
meant nothing.
The first day I spoke your first name - morning.
Twenty-five second gaps, my illness
for the patterns
your eyes choose when unfocused
while speaking of temperature gradients
on the northeast ridge of Everest, the snowpack
still heavy from the warm and wet event
earlier, you said
he couldn't have made it
alone, without Irvine,
unless the perfunctory footstep
onward was enough to save a man
from falling away, and with that word,
away - Sara.
Scarcely a difference between what they took
with them and what blew through
the second story
window,
a handwritten receipt in Hebrew,
sheet music,
invitations for next
month's approaching celebration received
by a line of shoes and socks.
Django Reinhardt's fourth and fifth digits
curled from overexposure to smoke and blaze,
curled the same year
you unlearned the
word - Manouches.
From this gurney, photographs
the nurses take of me, the small
tasks divided
into quadrants, the lower half
of my left arm, that which was not an arm
but a wing when set
to music.
Earthenware more porous than metal, absorbs particles of the flesh
Epicurean - your swollen yellow skin. The morning I left you found
photographs, Seeing the Earth
from 80 Miles Up. German V-2 rockets in White Sands,
New Mexico.
October 1950. National Geographic's faded pages
halved by nine AM glare
from the bay window where you are not fucking but holding
my photograph. Thin yellow hair ablaze
dust particles that had risen
long before the shutter
snapped.
Furniture that ruins wood when it is not carried but dragged
into the center of a unoccupied room. Grooves, coins,
pages stuck together from the evening I braised
quail.
One fifth of the time it took me to find sand
you crossed the living room, lit matches, launched fire on a colony -
ants.
