The Vessel
“when the gathering turns for its portrait
and by sudden trick of alignment and light and
night, all I see
the same, the same, the same, the same, the same—”
—Frank Bidart, The Second Hour of the Night
The duplicity of waking
and again.
The blue planet,
an infant, hurtling on a path
at nothing.
Our rotations suggest to us
careful collisions.
Lunation and solstice,
marked on paper that dead men
gave life,
bending around the curve until
no one can tell
what is rising and falling.
We have learned to atrophy
by measuring,
to divine because
we remember.
Made and even nightly
remade, like mud
shaped by hands or
the tide, we borrow
ourselves from our kin,
tuck and refunnel them
uncounted times
as so many selves.
Your grandmother was lent
the same red-faced howl
and side-eyed smirk
by blood strangers.
None of us
belongs to us
for long.
Meat and might,
flab and flesh,
medium and means,
reconfigured in the sequence.
Patchworks of predecessors,
we begin,
a tangle in the loop,
only revolutions.
John
Ripped from
the pink-filled egg
by stiff hands, he came
reluctantly into this world.
He wants to crawl back
into the bathtub of his mother
and plunges inside us.
I Want to Burn Up
Somewhere a drum rolls,
but there is too much
light to see
the beast that makes the sound
anymore.
Our thighs clinch tighter
around his
barrel body.
He only dashes on.
Slick hair, sweat—
snout, belly, teeth.
She dared me to
ride, called me
chicken. But now,
I’m not sure if she’s
laughing or
screaming as
her hair becomes a
blaze. Then,
the sun is too
much again. I squint
and it’s