after Ada Limón
1.
What I fear most: the burning
sky, never being able to speak
again. The sharp, inimitable voicelessness
of the swallow that knows
she is already dead.
2.
Once, a boy told me
he wanted to write a long poem
about rivers.
Is that what this is? In the cemetery
a child laughs his way around
the mausoleum,
calling to his little sister
He’s dead.
Come on.
3.
Wrap me in tape
and throw me in the river.
I’ll end up in the place
where chrysanthemums grow
out of fox skulls.
Name the bones
for the petals.
Call them Eliza, rain,
teeth. I’ll call it heaven.
4.
In the night, I tear
off my name, skinnydip
in this wine-dark city I never wanted
to call home,
far from my family. I could build
my life here. I could be dead
here. Naked, nameless,
no one knows who I am
anyway. Two wolves
hunt in the dark, and I
am more of an animal, primal instinct
for survival.
I put my name back on.
5.
Now, the river. A riddle.
Is that what this is?
Mixed-up understandings of why
my arms fall into the water.
I am losing myself, thumbs first.
I want to feed the water my body, to be
bodiless. The act of leaving
is graceful, primal, it has become
mine. The river
is always going somewhere. I am always
going.
6.
Thick light, the kind
to fall in love to. The right kind of song
on the FM radio, a song that can stand up
and build a barn
in the middle of the prairie, canvas
for teenage vandalism, can build summer
while it’s there too. A girl draws
her life complete, charcoal sketches
and broken wheat.
The song, a funeral march.
7.
Am I imagining
life or death, refractions
of each other?
These are my versions of heaven.
The river never ends, it bends
and bends until it breaks
into ocean.
He’s dead.
Come on.
Stop writing about this.
8.
A portrait. When the sun falls to the earth,
the pines catch fire
and the whole cemetery burns.
Name it sunset.
I am there. I am here, in this poem,
unapologetic dynamism
of water, I will not burn.
Let me be a force of nature.
Let me never die.
Wild animal, and powerless, and magnificently
continuing. I will sculpt the land
around me. I will bend and bend
and break
into the ocean.
