Ars Poetica
Whatever it was
I thought the end of my twenties
would amount to, I was wrong
about that. The end
of my twenties are about
death and the way death drapes
itself sparkling over our lives.
People are falling away
from us, people are peeling
and tumbling away.
The ground calls our names
in its sweet soil voice, the song
of our names rising up
from the ground like the smell
of hot bread lifting
out of its crust.
People are falling away
from us and I have come
to love the darkness of night
like I loved you, like a lover
whose eyes carve me
into the shape of myself
when they look. Everything
extraneous is burning away
but it is not graceful
it is a gift of sharp blade
the end of my twenties
is the surgeon survival
of death cutting back
what I no longer need.
Someone told me to speak
from my scars, not my wounds
which feels true when my body
leans away from the people
whose loved ones
are dying because I am
breathless when death
touches death in the night.
Is a wound too raw
to speak from?
I am sorry
your loved ones are peeling away
but really I
am not sorry.
At the end of my twenties I learned
that one single night can be as long
as a handful of years
that a wound is a story
that stories have names
and when I catalogue it
this night
will bear your name
alongside an index called
Kinds Of Crying, which include:
Ecstatic, Furious, Longing,
Disbelief. Someone told me
to speak from my scars
not my wounds, which might explain why
I am not ready to converse with
the newly bereaved, because
when I bump into them in this long
crackling darkness my wound
heaves its great fist over my
tongue and only my eyes tell
the truth. When I catalogue it
this night will be called The End
Of My Childhood and
it will be called Our Beauty and Terror
it will be called
What We're Here To Do.
I'm not sure though if I agree
about the scars and the wounds
because at the end of my twenties
it is my hand reaching
into the mouth of the wound
to pull forth each word
to place it against the blank page
where it cools and solidifies
and isn't that maybe the way a scar
forms? And the sweet song
of the earth
beckoning
all of us
back.
Copyright Credit: Mónica Gomery, "Ars Poetica" from Here is the Night and the Night on the Road. Copyright © 2018 by Mónica Gomery. Reprinted by permission of Cooper Dillon Books.
Source: Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillion Books, 2018)