Curtain by Maleea Acker
para Argel Corpus, recordando mirando al sur desde San Pedro, Jalisco
The wind knocks the lakeside tansy and sorrel down. We need not fall apart to feel the feeling.
The stems rise again in the intake between gusts. Maybe we have the blue cloak of translation, a dog
shepherding our sounds. Maybe someone plays for us while we sprawl
on a stone floor in night’s mute. Maybe it is our song, named the name we could have been
had the poles been reversed, the losers the victorious, the pen the page. Under the scroll
of water the hyacinths rise and fall as new land. The shore takes them up as corsages,
pins its own breast. Maybe we will be saved by loss, Argel, the green bouquets held by force
in the middle of the wave while the shore climbs its stepladder. The stepladder’s
feet are unsteady in sand. The green nudges a world briefly lithe and learned.
It rises in our minds, flames itself out, carbon from coal,
bowing as it falls.