Anathema
Brother, you have survived the dark night of the soul, spent longing for the dead child who could no longer touch you, she awakened street-light left for the East coast in a mad flight to snowy mountains of paved night, you said you could reach the stars, you said you would carry that pain, but the sad evangelical morning of your troubled mind left in the quay of the sea, you walked the season's nightmare, stretched out like a crumbling pier to which the ocean returns its cement bottom, watching the cleanness of an autonomy of sea-gulls you stretched your legs on mountains of iron waste, I tasted the smell of her lips, the sweet perfume of her jockey, the mid-return of sweating animals inside the factory of silence, like Job the night burned an acidy red and the smile of God turned into thickening blood, I read the small engravings on her tiny shoulders, and as we held each other our sexes seemed to meet, the bright and illumined street turned quietly to its filthy residue, our bodies filled each other turned to discourse with the setting Sun, I could feel her coming anger like the wind that is mismanaged, so you too knew that the bones of her language would shatter in a single night, smelling the poison of the Cities dark and anguished winter, was it Christmas that came without her, was it the dead that mourned the living, or had the madness transcended yesterday was it the polish of smoke on the mirrored buildings that felt like a blind guitar onto the black street, music chanted in the flesh our wandering hands could meet, but there in the coldness of death she returned empty building falling upwards, shaken by the corpse of the wind.
Reprinted by kind permission of the Regents of the University of California,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Gift of Diane Walker Murray