Author: clockhart

I often picture an odd world where we’re all gone

and all that’s left are the scarecrows.

–

when the space-folk come to earth,

they’ll find the cities empty —

engines left running, stoves still on

like the hollow and forward-moving body

of a ghost ship.

–

the farmlands, though,

will be riddled with figures. they’ll study them

like fossils. they may not get everything right,

but at the very least our crop-watching tombstones

will bear a semblance of us.

–

they’ll say, they had two arms,

two eyes, wore hats and kept sacred

their golden kingdoms from the birds

who would otherwise have their bounties.

–

they may also say,

their skin was burlap. their blood was straw.

they hovered like phantoms

on haphazard crucifixes,

and they hardly moved but for the wind.

–

from wherever we have gone,

we’ll think yes, but…

whisper the way tall grass does.

they won’t hear us, most likely.

–

if they do,

they’ll lean in to the string-made mouths

of those that have survived us —

–

they’ll ask the scarecrows,

but what?

they didn’t come from where you think —

I grew them from my hair in their larval forms,

caterpillars nipping at my skin,

their tiny footsteps dappling my skull 

and in turn I covered their small bodies

like a blanket. later,

–

before the world had turned from them in seeing

that they were not butterflies,

they built cocoons that hung from me,

and together we all slept.

–

when they left, I felt that I, too,

no longer had ground beneath my feet;

we all shed something that day.

I would cry, I am your home,

and they — for from my lips, 

they had learned to speak — would say,

yes, yes, yes:

–

but so is here, and here, and here.

and don’t you understand?

–

and what they said next I could never catch,

for I’d left nets behind in another life

where there was such thing

as loneliness. but they teach me, 

in time, sticking to my windows

and hiding against the sky,

that even the night is company

–

and there are things of more significance

than turning yourself into a shelter.

–

some nights, I hear the fatal percussion they make

when they throw themselves against the porch lights

until their bodies burn, and break,

and fall.

–

I ask them, why?

and they say, don’t you understand?

and this time I listen —

reach a palm out like a paper-thin wing, 

and listen —

–

they say, don’t you understand?

we are looking for the moon.

dear thing / blessed bad-luck omen / do they know you anymore in this god-fearing place? / can they explain you away in myth / or in miracles? / here is a story / of how the body used to die / back when the windmills spoke / and the electric towers were gods that turned themselves to devils when the storms came / once the spirit congealed like ink and turned soot-black with time / and new people were built from the jawbones of more ancient things / once everything ran downhill / like rivers / like the heavy stone of sisyphus / which was never a stone / but a skull / the size of a house / it was the first of all death premonitions / and they’ve been spilling from our sinks ever since / every night my teeth fall out / and each morning every piece of me grows back / molecule by molecule / universe by universe / like the city inside a petri dish / the urban sprawl of beetles on a corpse / mushrooms in a fairy circle / when were you last lonely for the last time? / how many yesterdays ago / did you become someone you didn’t recognize? / tomorrow I will wake up for the thousandth thousandth time / and forget you like I always do / I may not even look out my window / you know better than any figment / that things need not be real to have shadows / you need not see ghosts to be haunted / you are one phantom / I am another / dear pair of eyes / I pray you / keep some of me with you when you go / it’s all any set of syllables could want / to be placed in a mouth / gently / and chewed like meat / when I am nothing / I think what I’ll miss most / is being tasted / when I am back in whatever ether I sprang from / I think I’ll long / for a pair of hands / do you remember my hands? / I created you, didn’t I? / sacred piece of evil / memento mori / I know one day this world will die and the candles will scream in the shape of smoke / I know you had no hand in being the herald of disasters / speaking with mouthfuls of crickets and ink / and clean as a tomb thanks to the persistence of the maggots / tell me, old god / what do you owe the decomposers? / how deathless is your debt once the rot sets in? / there are no vultures left to pick at your decay / poor beast / so I hope you have something to cloak yourself in when you declare yourself king / of this sunken city / where nothing remains but closed windows / and dry riverbeds / sometimes a nightmare is less of a nightmare / and more of a stray / old thing / I pity your hollowness / I’m sorry you cannot wake / when I do

what odd recurrences: I dreamt of the sea again

and us just talking, wave-tossed.

have you sailed, really sailed?

like sun-cracked lips and tongue-in-knots sailed,

not sure if you would jump toward sky or sea

if a voice like eternity told you, swim.

–

have you been overcome by the weight of it all?

I imagine something rests beneath us, sleeping,

larger than a universe, small enough to hold in your hand

and able to swallow you whole (though it won’t).

–

and were you to walk far enough southeast

you could slip through the fog into heaven and if the gods

resting out in the water sat up to stretch

they could speak like you and I do again,

–

tongue and cheek instead of mist

and high tide. mother of coast knows nothing

of flesh born from clay,

or from rib — she remembers crafting limb and skin

and laughter from what seafoam she had to spare. 

–

she sent us to the shore in sand dollars and shells,

each body a coarse and imperfect venus. now

she sends us home with the taste of salt on our teeth

and sand between our toes, saying, here,

have something to remember me by.

–

until the day we remember no more,

and return to her again.

–

all this, though, is distant. for now,

we talk. the ocean babbles at such frequencies

as to snatch from the air and put them

in your pocket, and in quietness we do the same,

–

as though nothing else could matter.

and nothing does; here, your hands are wet.

hold them to the sun to dry.

She’s made from nothing: dust, prayer,

apple skins, and she asks to be buried

in the desert.

–

Our lady’s clothes are stiff with sand,

so she lets me remove them for cleaning,

one by one. Meanwhile, we talk.

–

Her necklace is first, pearls

turned brown from the wind. I fiddle with the clasp

until it breaks, pretend 

not to feel her skin on mine

cold like cream.

–

She says, I shouldn’t be saying this,

and her voice trails off like a shallow stream.

I rub the beads with my thumb until 

they shine, and then a little more,

and try not to look her in the eyes.

I say, what?

–

What she tells me goes missing

in the drone of a passing truck,

one headlight dim like a bad eye.

–

I ask her to repeat herself

and take off her shoes, soft and close-toed.

She says, it’s a sin of mine, jealousy,

but they buried everything holy

with him.

–

(Christ is some yards down the road,

the last of the sand

being pulled over his cruciform

like a woolen sheet.)

–

I nod — a nonbeliever,

or something like it, it is not

my place. Our four hands

unbutton her blue dress, slowly. 

We pull it off in silence,

and I push it into the basin

in, out, in again

–

until the clear water is speckled with earth

like a sky flecked with dying stars. I do not ask her

what heaven is like. I take her socks, 

and hang them to dry. I do not ask

–

why we are here, in the land 

of in-betweens, nor how the Father

has been, nor the sun, whose place has been taken

by a hollow and inauspicious crescent.

I do not ask

why she herself is so fragile, 

so vulnerable, why she doesn’t bid me

to wash her land-caked hair,

why I am here at all.

–

Whether it would be so unholy

to kiss her quiet lips, or to drive away

in a blind and broken-down car.

–

Instead, we let the dry air do as it will.

Her clothes, fluttering on the line,

bloom from dark to light,

and we do not exchange a word

as I dress her again.

–

When I have finished, 

she says, Bless you. She means,

Thank you. I do not say,

I love you.

–

She lies down in her Sunday best,

and I begin to push sand

until she is gone from the Earth again.