This is a map
drawn from memory,
through a streaming speculum of echoes
upon meager parchment, burning
in exile and erasure,
comes the sound of glass split
in half, shards
of chirping in the window,
trickle of daylight and ash,
and the quickening
pitch of the darkbody,
chiming, glassbody
breaking into sweat,
breaking into rivers,
amid its bruises and wildflowers,
a wing sewn by hand, my hands
tended like candles for a storm, in yours,
fall through the night’s caesura,

faces against the glass,
hold a fine geometry of fingerprints
in the cicada’s heavy breath,
a phantom, a rainstorm,
the fragile lace of a collar
binds the inconsolable pitch
of the body, risen
from rows of indigo roses,
an old wound tingles close to the heart,
routes, inroads, maps
its anatomy all tangles in calico
and glass and poppies,
how these jagged seasons of the moon
keep the darkhorse body
sequestered in a shuttered room,
with its heat like a leash
in your palm, wrapped,
rapt, is the secret of waking
the flesh, out of nothing,

come shining, you said,
for I have you in hand.


2007©babygirLPress