Speak to Us

For all of my years, I’ve read only living signs—

bodies in jealousy, bodies in battle,

bodies growing disease like mushroom coral.

It is tiresome, tiresome, describing

fir cones waiting for fires to catch their human ribs

into some slow, future forest.

My beloved, he tires of me, and he should—

my complaints the same, his recourse

the same, invoking the broad, cool sheet suffering drapes

over the living freeze of heart after heart,

and never by that heart’s fault—the heart did not make itself,

the face did not fashion its jutting jawbone

to wail across the plains or beg the bare city.

I will no longer tally the broken, ospreyed oceans,

the figs that outlived summer

or the tedious mineral angles and

their suction of light.

Have you died? Then speak.

You must see the living

are too small as they are,

lonesome for more

and in varieties of pain

only you can bring into right view.