Jill Alexander Essbaum

5 am .  One-quarter past. Distant chimes inform me this. A bell peal knells the mist. And sunlight’s not yet bludgeoning. But some light gets blood going. Last night it was snowing and now every path’s a pall. Though mine the only footfalls at this hour of awe. Above hangs a canopy of needle leaf. Below, the season’s mean deceit— that everything stays white and clean. It doesn’t, of course, but I wish it. My prayers are green with this intent, imploring winter wrens to trill and begging scuttling bucks come back. There’s something that I lack. A wryneck bullet-beaks a branch. His woodworm didn’t have a chance. What I miss, I’ve never had. But I am not a ghost. I am a guest. And life is thirst, at best. So do not strike me, Heart. I am, too, tinder. I’m flammable as birch bark, even damp. Blue spruce, bee-eater— be sweeter to me. Let larksong shudder to its January wheeze, but gift these hands a happiness just once. It is half passed. And I am cold. Another peal has tolled. I’ve told the sum of my appeals. I need not watch for fox. They do not congregate at dawn. But I would, were I one.

Let us tunnel Through the rubble, Through the thrum. Let us rut through the sum Of who we were, Or are, Or will be in the years to come: A couple Of someones Who used to be in love.

They perched on roofs and fences and sills. They posed statue-still on catenary lines. They aligned along cables like prayer beads on rope. They amassed en masse on the cemetery lawn and marauded the broad, yawning fields like cattle. Their cackles were black. Each shadow dove and pecked. They nested in chimneys and chirped at the chime of the church bell. They worked in shifts. Clocked out at odd hours. They laid their eggs in the V s of trees. They teemed on the dry-baked banks of creek beds, streams the sun had overseen. They teetered on the bed-knob tops of flagpoles. They pitched like pennies into founts. They pitched like babies into wells. They thumped at doors then skulked away like hoodlum teens. They jabbed her. When she cried they did it faster. Everyone knows what happened next. Some grew big as sunflower stalks, others tall like bonfire flames. Or moving vans. Or the sick, brick houses people die inside of every night. Their hatchlings canopied the sky. Was it her fault, then, when they pinned her to the ground and thrust their feathers down her throat? Or wormed between her legs in bad-man ways? Or rattled plumes and whooped and beat her body with their wings? Or locked their talons to her thighs and tra-la-la-ed that ditty from the old-time music box? Or forced their whiskies past her lips? Or put her in the pillory? This was foreplay, in a way. They rolled in rabid packs and woofed like dogs. She couldn’t throw a bone. The meat was gone. They chased her and they named her and they boiled her tears and bathed her. Then they ate her.

The border of a thing. Its edge or hem. The selvage, the skirt, a perimeter’s trim. The blow of daylight’s end and nighttime’s beginning. A fence or a rim, a margin, a fringe. And this: the grim, stingy doorstep where the lapse of passage happens. That slim lip of land, the liminal verge that slips you past your brink. Where and when you blink.

A clementine Of inclement climate Grows tart. A crocus Too stoic to open, Won’t. Like an oyster That cloisters a spoil of pearls, Untouched— The heart that’s had Enough Stays shut.

First it is one day without you. Then two. And soon, our point: moot . And our solution, diluted. And our class action (if ever was) is no longer suited. Wherewith I give to looting through the war chest of our past like a wily Anne Bonny who snatches at plunder or graft. But the wreck of that ransack, that strongbox, our splintering coffer, the claptrap bastard of the best we had to offer, is sog-soaked and clammy, empty but for sand. Like the knuckle-white cup of my urgent, ghastly hands in which nothing but the ghost of love is held. Damn it to hell.

We shall not come again, not to this wet and summer day, nor to the waylaid place where you laid waste to me and I to you, and where we reminisced recalling who did what to whom. We shall not come again. Not to the bed we thrashed nor to the memory of the way I brushed my hair back, nights, nor to the air we dared to share to breathe, or couldn’t quite. We shall not come again. No more, my face seen round your corner, or your briefcase found beneath my table. We weren’t able, apt or sane. We shall not come again. Nor cry nor clutch, not even once again. We shall not cover up in quilts or bear the beast of one another’s guilts or sit in silences made saddest by what

is my season of defeat. Though all is green and death is done, I feel alone. As if the stone rolled off from the head of the tomb is lodged in the doorframe of my room, and everyone I’ve ever loved lives happily just past my able reach. And each time Jesus rises I’m reminded of this marble fact: they are not coming back.

The shift of sleepwalks and suicides. The occasion of owls and a demi-lune fog. Even God has nodded off And won't be taking prayers til ten. Ad interim, you put them on. As if your wants could keep you warm. As if. You say your shibboleths. You thumb your beads. You scry the glass. Night creeps to its precipice And the broken rim of reason breaks Again. An obsidian sky betrays you. Every serrate shadow flays you. Soon enough, the crow will caw. The cock will crow. The door will close. (He isn't coming back, you know.) And so wee, wet hours of grief relent. In thirty years you might forget Precisely how tonight's pain felt. And in whose black house you dwelt.