COLD ANGEL OF MERCY

Suite: Awakening from the Promise of Land

56 Suite: Awakening from the Promise of Land i. She lost. Her black boat sits in a field of white poppies. She waits at the keel. She watches from the sad rooms of her body, her eyes dark, two shining stones. ii. She sat in her room of flowered wallpaper, cross-stitching a world of black orchids. I blame her for being afraid. Now I give her what I can, these threads of light and skin, blood-hymns written in the room where I cried like a child with that first sharp fuck. She lost the world for both of us. She lost the world for both of us. iii. The eyes of the birch close and leave her. Birches sense the tenacity of clear weather, of sun-lit things. She does not want to go on alone. iv. Step one: remove the right eye, look only with the left. 57 v. A swirl of gnats above a doe. Step two: remember the face you loved first and remember how you felt when you hated it. vi. Her son brings a bowl of small hailstones into the bedroom, places them under her reading lamp. She is writing a letter, a question: What does salvation mean? The storm has broken another branch off the mimosa. Sycamore leaves everywhere, and the phone call from her mother. Did it hit hard? Pretty hard, but the rose bushes made it. These days, at least, the everyday events are talk. viii. Night sifts its fine grain of stars on the water. The heron on the far bank has long since closed in shadow. She has tried to sleep with silence falling from the eaves, but keeps returning to herself, shivering from an inescapable rain. 58 In the dying hour, even sycamores must wait. ix. She leans towards the window, pushing dirt from the skin of potatoes. She wants to say it is all right to leave, that she deserves better than this man that never sees her shining slightly by the window. A fog curls off the black sleeve of the river. x. Because she becomes afraid of her skin, her body drifts in a boat of wrecked stars. Tonight, she will go out looking, and take the cold as a good sign. ...