lately it seems i'm discovering people just as they die. i read the poem of the day this morning and later i read the poet just died. my awareness is focused by death. it seems it is a time when death is everywhere, in all our creation. maybe i can go back from there, considering i'm still alive. it seems a shame though to only note in passing what we couldn't see alive. 

 

How Can It Be I Am No Longer I

 

Winter was the ravaging in the scarified

Ghost garden, a freak of letters crossing down a rare

 

Path bleak with poplars. Only the yew were a crewel
Of kith at the fieldstone wall, annulled

 

As a dulcimer cinched in a green velvet sack.
To be damaged is to endanger—taut as the stark

 

Throats of castrati in their choir, lymphless & fawning
& pale. The miraculous conjoining

 

Where the beamless air harms our self & lung,
Our three-chambered heart & sternum,

 

Where two made a monstrous
Braid of other, ravishing.

 

To damage is an animal hunch
& urge, thou fallen—the marvelous much

 

Is the piece of Pleiades the underworld calls
The nightsky from their mud & rime. Perennials

 

Ghost the ground & underground the coffled
Veins, an aneurism of the ice & spectacle.

 

I would not speak again. How flinching
The world will seem—in the lynch

 

Of light as I sail home in a winter steeled
For the deaths of the few loved left living I will

 

Always love. I was a flint
To bliss & barbarous, a bristling

 

Of tracks like a starfish carved on his inner arm,
A tindering of tissue, a reliquary, twinned.

 

A singe of salt-hay shrouds the orchard-skin,
That I would be—lukewarm, mammalian, even then,

 

In winter when moss sheathes every thing alive
& everything not or once alive.

 

That I would be—dryadic, gothic, fanatic against
The vanishing; I will not speak to you again.

Lucie Brock-Broido