death

Born into wandering, yes
though I do not claim beginning.
Only that I am.  I ask.
With the body mind says,

you ask to be dead.  It thinks death
is stone. But it is stone
though it swarms like the flies.
In dreams, travels

through strange woods, between
granite houses, down abandoned
leafy streets skirting
high barbed-wire electric, fencing ash;

and overhears conversations
that vacillate between tongue
and no tongue; and is
the third, listening

to its couched voices lilting
through the dark.  Secretly
I think, it longs to be dead. It waits
overcast because it does not know

its own becoming, does not yet hear
its witness speak: Oh,
that the dying dissolves its death
that the water, stone.

I wrap my arms around the trunk of her
and still she stands, scrag arms spoking high,
last of the needled green gone now
from her crest. Straight still, strong still
rooted to the sweet and cankerous ground

you are dying, I say.
Then I press against my beard her coarse skin,
squeezing out her death,
dredging up the love in me, resurrecting
us from the cold underbelly of thought.

And to hold myself a moment buoyant
thank you for your death, I say,
though your heartwood is too soft to raft. Yes
I say, and let us stand apart,
because we are our learning to unmoor.

Last night I was hungry and dark. I put cereal in my mouth and bit into the body of a white maggot.

I spit out its dying body and ran to the bathroom. I rinsed with mouthwash and more maggots, reeling from the antiseptic, erupted and wriggled onto my tongue. Examining myself in the mirror, I saw that maggots had burrowed inside the roof of my mouth, the fleshy areas near my tonsils, the sides of my throat. I would spit them into the sink; sometimes I could taste them—squishy and bitter when I accidentally bit down.

Later, I woke from sleep with a sick fullness in my stomach and a squirming in my throat. Deaf and unable to breathe, I ran to the bathroom and from my mouth, I pulled their smooth white bodies: white and wormy, they had grown in size while I slept. I pulled them from my ears and from my nose; I knew that I could breathe again because I could hear that I was breathing. But when I looked at the roof of my mouth in the mirror, I saw more bloody black lumps where maggots were growing, laying their eggs—some were dying inside of me.

I went to the desert to let them wither. I thought that when they dried out and shriveled, I could scrape them out of me like raisins, the larger ones like prunes. But soon I wanted only to drink—the dry air parched my throat and the maggots still squirmed, faster and whiter, longer and more slippery. They always came out clean, though my mouth was filling with blood.

Then I looked out: I looked around a small dusty room with tan curtains and wooden bunk beds, which had become my place of waiting. I saw my mother—she was standing at the doorway, leaving, her hair blowing wild in the desert wind. The room was nailed together, flat wooden boards turned gray by the dry heat. Sunlight was streaming in through the cracks between the planks and the rusted holes of the tin roof. I was alone again, scalding in the silent bright.

And so I stood in front of an old washbasin and looked into its dusty oval mirror. I reached into my throat and pulled. This one was long, I could feel it coming up like a breathing tube, and it coiled as I pulled, its white body writhing in my hand, then relaxing in the violent light.

Last night, the autumn arrived with the rain. Go out,
the leaves have turned up their palms. Oh, to breathe
deeply again, to feel expansive in the immense

space summer left behind! We can see ourselves
once more, buttoned and bustling. Crowded together,
we smile to each other, as if we have just noticed

for the first time. We are too high on cold oxygen.
Too full of freedom. For now change feels like no end,
even though the wind sends darkened leaves scurrying

through the streets, birds scattering from the trees.
We feel that winter's lonely hours are far from now.
We trust that the death of things is not, their dying only joy.