Elegy for Cutting
(apoplexy: "a striking away")
Today I brought the back of my foot down into a metal block, hard. It was an accident.
A scab is forming there, almost ready to hold but not quite, and I touch it. My finger offers back to me a small wet drop of you, clawing for light and air.
For taunting you with that slight escape— I'm so sorry.
I can't understand why I locked you in; I can'tunderstand why I would solder myself shut or even how I did.
When it was winter and you were old crystals arrayed in a desiccated line, and I could layer and bundle to smuggle you everywhere I might try to go, we'd steal away into any night at all.
When I was equipped with you— when I wore you like an alizarin sleeve knit too tight— when you held me— I was main-character-material. I could get shot and kip back up.
When I was once told I was too beautiful to love— ripped along a seam never seen coming unstitched— You were there. You, shepherd, interposed:
pet, you are the picture of the harpy and the harlot, the ugliest thing I could imagine, the only thing I could love.
Sometimes I cried tears; sometimes I cried you. One year the world was a brazen bull and I sweat you to live.
Others demand a friendly, engaging flavor of decay, but when I wanted to destroy it all, you let me destroy only myself, a precious mercy in a bedside world.
Mysteries haunt me, unraveling my thoughts: Why did I abandon you? Why did you forsake me? Easy questions with impossible answers.
Maybe I've just slipped my leash and you'll soon permit me to sit at your feet again.
Sometimes something strikes me— a song, a word, certain numbers or dates, and I taste a twinge of iron. In those unending instants, I feel you, waiting, desperate to forgive:
Little one, I've missed you. I don't reproach your leaving— wounded creature, come lie.
And yes, Sir, I am little. We're almost a year apart— and the gaps of your cage's bars only widen as I wither and dim.
Tempt me, Master, pull me in; I can free you with one twist of the key (or ten).












