As For Me (For Kristamas)
1213.2011
As for me:
Leave me to my own plans and the chaos they bear,
Like the chaos of reeds bending,
As if giving up their lives to the storm.
This autumn the flowers died near the beginning,
As if the sun persuaded them with promises of brighter days
And the heat they took was their end.
The irrigation and chill came late, when the land was already desiccated
And the long dark hours made clicks inside my dreams -
(Where bones fold from knowledge
And take on the appearance of the dead.)
In this dream I’ve become fond of cellars,
Derelict doors, the table and untidy chair,
The white tree, flat and thin with its lover quill –
And breathing in the dust and skin that visited previously;
Exoskeletons tied and hung to silk like translucent curios,
As if they designed their deaths
Knowing how they wished to be found.
Beneath the unfurled moths and perfume,
You buried yourself from asphalt labyrinths
Hitched to harsh cycles and machines.
No trace of you as day becomes night
And the moon showers its jeweled plumage
Onto my locks and look, kissing my complexion
As I sigh satisfied and not, and then curve,
Lilting like a sad note that recollects about
The closing stages,
About the hours where we were held green...
I've become an empty abbey
Whose saints before gave heat to its garrets and oratories.
I've traversed solitude as a woman of letters
Dressed in a hand tilled to prevent,
Yet by some means, fetching of the day of reckoning –
And you, wherever you circle as if flung in the wind,
And the quiet of that thing, lost in its quiet current,
Bathed and drowning in quinine stars,
where the click of an hour turns inside my dream.
- Marni
