after Carl Dennis
I earned a degree quoting the many thoughts of Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Elliot, etc. Every night, my head bent at the reading
table where the lamp light licks my eyes into an itch, an epitaph
echoing in my mind because I thought books were going to be
the destrier that'd gallop me to my slaughter. In my other life,
I am a boy, and what do I know except to run alongside the other
boys, bare skin, leaf-pants. Our bodies wet from the river's
very spittle. I climb trees, learn the dialects of leopards, sleep
with birds cooing by my bedside. In that other life, a boy my age
who has my face slits my wrist and what gushes out is gold, and we
aren't surprised. In our lexicon, there is no word for force, kill, bite,
etc. The closest word to violence is forty syllables long. In my
current life, I'm an ellipsis —a thread traveling in the tendon of a
dead animal. I wake up every night amid bones clacking then
distilling into ash. In this life, I'm 23, sober, jobless, have dreams
where I stand before students who'd never hesitate to laugh at
how I pronounce their fathers' fathers' names. I write poems where
I am either an arrow or the body that suffers its violence. In that
life, my other life, I soliloquize into shells, and my God eavesdrops,
laughs, advises me to be a comedian. The angels nod, agree with
Him. I'm a bridge and a boon. I build lives out of ligaments. My clan
puts me on a camel to save a dying continent. I am neither a lamb
nor a wolf. I am a tree at a river's tongue, which means archangels
gather around me to assign duties to destinies. In my one true life,
I search for joy. Colted by loss, paddled by ghosts of women who
planted their names in my ribs before knowing the calm of coffins.
In that other life, I am no one's child, even joy begs to adopt me.