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To Catch A Falling Knife
Temple your hands palm to palm and hold them out. Let slice between your thumbs the day’s last light. To catch a falling knife you have to double-doubt the knife: its rosewood handle doubt and doubt its stone-ground blade or singing down the knife will come cleaving ring from pinky finger, light from dark and what you believe, once and for all, from what you don’t. To catch a falling knife you have to believe there is no knife. Temple, now, your trembling hands.
0
Zero can hold me for days, small sack of white, and I hold it back, carrying it with me, hollow as a wing bone, weightless as winter light. I bring zero here— where the wind empties its mouth again and again, where seabirds circle and sing, where men squat on buckets to fish— and it swells in me, wet days when the boats ghost past: a zero so large I know I could pass my body through it.
After Life
(Dead) we are lugging buckets of black paint through the streets. My sister (dead) stops to darken a pigeon; my mother (dead) stoops to smirch the steps of the church. With bucket and brush, this is our job. Night is night, my father (dead) declares, because it’s dark: so we run through the world, my brother and I, (dead, dead) painting each fleck of light black for the rapist, black for the stars.