Twenty-seven of Fifty

I birthed a horse the color of sunrise and rode
her into my own bed, waking. She trampled my regrets,
long nettled in memory's ancient vines, and her hooves
chipped and slashed at night's walls—for
I meant to ford the ice-choked channel
and not to wake in this warm fog.

Yes, the dream galloped out of me, bloody and bellowing,
and though weak, hollow-hipped and thighs limp as lopped stems,
I flung myself on, fingers crimped in her mane.
She ran like a childhood. Gowned in her speed and crowned
in restraint she took on my weight and then atoms burst free and she
fireworked and fled

as I slept, crying "Hide me from time, O God"
and as God buried time in my body

my dreamfruit hurdled whiteeyed at full leg headlong toward the wall
and she smashed us bonefirst forehead crushed on the stone
of day and you looked at me,
opening your eyes as her screams and huge heartbeat were fading,
and jiggled my thigh with your hand
as though the ache of invisibility had not woken me.

I walk unannotated from bed, flesh unbroken though I feel
the womb ripped and the blood pooled and caked in the crease of my skin.
I walk, the clothed shadow of stalking dreams, behind anesthetized eyes
surging, hemophiliac with the fact that you, my beloved, live
invisible to me, that a beast's heart bursts also in you
and dreams tower unnamed—

Will you take it, this umbilical cord of words,
will you take a kiss on your hand? Neither I nor you
I swear it will be conquered by being unseen.
I gather breath, brace my bones, tighten tendons and open eyes
and ears and mouth and nose and skin and feed from the world's surfaces
again, the color and the vegetable change, the weather swirl and wrinkle
of expression through our age, the page of thumbprints and the trampled
laughter in the field, the parking lot of isolated souls' paused travel—
it's not enough to stop me that you don't see me watching.
I woke to it; mine's the day. I won't disown its beauty.


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