More Like the Stars

I don't want to be alive anymore. I don't want to be alive enough to want that. One is not meant to turn on one's creator with ferocity expendable in only one way. Or is that exactly how one is meant to turn to burn beyond the love that from beyond being has come to us: Christ's ever unhearable and thus always too bearable scream. In love and dread we learn to listen for beloved dread coming upon us like a whiplash rain we watch through a window. In pain we learn pain. Sometimes amid the rancid moonlight and mindlice of my insomnia there gleams a scalpel blade so clean with meaning so shaped and sharpened to interstellar blue that drawing it —in season due — across my own throat there comes not blood but an ancient answering starlight. Once upon a time in a pleasingly modern slaughterhospice with a view of sky-contempted skyscrapers and Lake Michigan's immaculate sewage my inner skin was skinned mouth to bowels, my soul —deadword, die to find it. For self-pity there must remain a self. Ah, but even shitting one's self one still finds one's self hastening to hide it all from the kind Ukranian nearly bearded night nurse. Fentanyl patches patching my stalactite thighs my diaphanous shoulders the very air eating me like a late leaf that once I would have flourished for a perishable lover or lonelied like some catpiss poignancy into a poem. Dead brain, living will, little pills entangling pain with adoration of it, morphine machine whose little beep (heavenly bell) conjures me to the suddenly more tolerable hallways of hell . . . Lovely Leila, so unsurgically curved, disclosing as she leans to clean my lines a bit of icelace undergarment like the very last trace of a glacier. The brain the brain the brain flickering electrically in and out, in, out— not the mind in which I love my wife whose tightwound nightmind conjures Christ in diapers, for instance, filthy infant, or later, in a mist of adolescent bad weather, bored of wood, dogdead Judea, squawk-box God, some restless absurdity of earth, she says, through which the rest of heaven can come. Once upon a time I walked through the chemical glamour of a night refinery sparking dangerously without and within for beside me under her underclothes undulated an incarnation of creation's finest failure: moonskin to make a young man wince coupled with stifling innocence. Still, we managed. And over the wrought-iron railing of the country club to which neither of us could possibly belong, in the moonskinned pool that seemed both to embody and imbibe her, we improved. And later, out on a green (to be sixteen!) when the starshower I thought was mine was mining me for sweat, muscle, memory to make its own death shine unceasingly inside of me, even unto hell, we excelled. Can it be that her last name was really Key? So much life in this poem so much salvageable and saving love but it is I fear I swear I tear open what heart I have left to keep it from being and beating and bearing down upon me • What rest in faith wrested from grief What truce with truth in bowing down not to the ground of being but simply to the ground Affliction flickers distant now like a structure on fire Love's reprieve moves through me like a breeze But antlike existence crawls all over me Lord and I cry out if you call this vise quiet a cry this riot of needs and genes an I Feelingly among the bones and nerves of sounds I make my scathing way Failingly in church or in the parked car before work I try to pray What might it mean to surrender to the wonder nothing means Not to end with a little flourish of earth Not to end • Love is the living heart of dread Love I love you unto the very edge of being Dead • Something in us suffering touches, teaches first to find little coves in our loves: blank nothings wherein we are what we always were — blank nothings — but changed or rearranged as atoms in the random kingdom of things: hand, we say, or eye, or hair, as if to make ourselves — to stake ourselves — truly there Knowing now not to move in time we are moved by tiger-striped tails bloodfine fins some natureless cerulean one would say thinking oneself out of nature Something in us, suffering, touches, torches, so we may saunter seeingly through an altogether other element, as once in the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago I floated    a moment with my love and the two new lives borne from us who loved best the eensy green almost unfish more like the stars when you close your eyes and whirl open to the whirling grains so freed from things you fall down laughing at the havoc For me for a long time not the minnows mattered but the pattern after: miraculous I didn't think to think: all those mite-eyes and animate instants answering at once to my need and to nothing as if my very nerves worked in finally a saving sense Something in us touches suffering touching us like the constellations of kinetic quiet that bound us beyond us as right to the wall the girls pressed their still-forming faces through which the wild new schools flew almost too green too blue to stand And I held your hand.