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| michelle moore |  | 1. Benediction Following Winter I take them back, my words that left us nothing to hide behind those nights I sat across from you as I would a holy book, reading into you all the meaning I could find until I saw my own nakedness in the dark tents of your eyes and felt afraid. I give you now this sun that holds the world in a gilded trance, and the resurrected mulberry plumed with birds, the music spilling from their barreled chests like wine, and the seeds we meekly cast onto the open wounds of winter gazing skyward, going up like saints on fire. 2. Posthumous Lights In Moscow, cosmetics and chemical baths preserve Lenin’s decline, Sienna boasts Saint Catherine’s air-tight head for those seeking heaven’s asylum, and when our bodies, the getaway vehicles for the lives that somehow fail us, fail us, some feel our souls survive, say, as almond saplings in West Coast groves, grafted to the rugged stumps we’ll thrive on. I’m convinced the friend I knew so well I could pick her out in a lineup of hands, feet, beat one-in-twenty-thousand odds for the witness protection program. Why else would she leave without a goodbye, and the body left behind looked nothing like hers. Granted, the choice was a difficult one, a sort of forced amnesia, but it explains why, in a city whose name I can’t place, when my shopping cart collides with the cart my dead friend wheels down the aisle, the wished-out stars of her eyes quickly fill with the bluer distances of day. 3. Standup Tragedy You could hide in your shadow’s deep embrace, hoard your sorrows in a tear vase, but what would you gain by hiding your genius for pain? It’s always best to suffer before an audience, life’s headlines played to the swell of applause, the world balanced on your every stricken syllable. So seize the stage in a halo of light, perform with flawless aplomb your latest heartache: how love was the wings that set something free inside you; now you wander, your mind like an empty street and lug your bird bones about with ash-filled eyes till your would-be assassin, compelled to perform once more his clumsy penance, hurls the stem of his body to your feet— O, the heavy costume of this life! | |
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