Speak to Us

For all of my years, I’ve read only living signs— bodies in jealousy, bodies in battle, bodies growing disease like mushroom coral. It is tiresome, tiresome, describing fir cones waiting for fires to catch their human ribs into some slow, future forest. My beloved, he tires of me, and he should— my complaints the same, his recourse the same, invoking the broad, cool sheet suffering drapes over the living freeze of heart after heart, and never by that heart’s fault—the heart did not make itself, the face did not fashion its jutting jawbone to wail across the plains or beg the bare city. I will no longer tally the broken, ospreyed oceans, the figs that outlived summer or the tedious mineral angles and their suction of light. Have you died? Then speak. You must see the living are too small as they are, lonesome for more and in varieties of pain only you can bring into right view.