Malachi Black

Once more the bright blade of a morning breeze glides almost too easily through me, and from the scuffle I’ve been sutured to some flap of me is freed: I am severed like a simile: an honest tenor trembling toward the vehicle I mean to be: a blackbird licking half notes from the muscled, sap-damp branches of the sugar maple tree

Some people might describe this room as spare: a bedside table and an ashtray and an antique chair; a mattress and a coffee mug; an unwashed cotton blanket and a rug my mother used to own. I used to have a phone. I used to have another room, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge. I used to water my bouquet of paper clips and empty pens, of things I thought I’d want to say if given chance; but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch a particle of thought dote on the dust and dwindle in a little grid of shadow on the sunset’s patchy rust seems like enough.

LAUDS Somehow I am sturdier, more shore than sea-spray as I thicken through the bedroom door. I gleam of sickness. You give me morning, Lord, as you give earthquake to all architecture. I can forget. You put that sugar in the melon’s breath, and it is wet with what you are. (I, too, ferment.) You rub the hum and simple warmth of summer from afar into the hips of insects and of everything. I can forget. And like the sea, one more machine without a memory, I don’t believe that you made me. PRIME

Fat bed, lick the black cat in my mouth each morning. Unfasten all the bones that make a head, and let me rest: unknown among the oboe-throated geese gone south to drop their down and sleep beside the out-

Now I can see: even the trees