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The Off Hours
For Jeff Metcalf, the first to go.
1.
Late autumn, just as our world was falling
apart, I wandered deep animal paths
cut into hills above the hospital,
through whose black windows bleary patients see
how life will appear once they are gone;
yellow mountains, clouds, warm light tying it
all together, though we never knew what
it meant; now we gasp in the company
of blue-lipped strangers wasting in their beds.
2.
Fine-boned, fingers so pointed I could pick
locks with them; tarnished skin stretched tight across
my knuckles, translucent as skulls preserved
in ice; one would be wrong to think human
hands are not akin to such strife; they curl
into balls without being told, not claws
or fists for striking, but obedient
apples conjuring the butchered pig’s smile.
3.
Alive to quilled air, I do not count this
hour or think beyond sundown; I am done
imagining a future we do not
deserve; I contemplate life without us,
a plane absent of human intention,
of our belief that we alone exist
or can live beyond reach of suffering.
4.
December light sets fire to the landscape;
everything shimmers with uncertainty;
nothing is itself; not the hollow gusts
rattling dry fields of brome, or coursing
along the unlit tunnels of my lungs;
fluttering with bright leaves, half-dead trees sing
old songs only they know and the hare stays
alive by mimicking Cambrian stone.
5.
Bloody welter of hide inscribes the ground;
posthumous messages—better to go
quick by lion bite in the highlands than
any postmodern death; give me the fang
before dousing me in viral lava,
lightning before this end we saw coming.
I mull ribs and spines, gnawed skeletal tines;
cold evidence of the body’s plundered
machinery; I study gnawed deer bones
for notes I cannot glean from the rushing
wind, for reasons that escape me, remnants
underfoot, those glib obituaries
no one makes the effort to write; errant
creations, unsung lives we turned into
a living hell for the time they were here.
6.
Something inside slips away when I spot
an injured crow cowering in the grass;
I notice how the long, beating feathers
above its heart betray his resemblance
to shadow, his failed attempt to disguise
demise in blackened cheatgrass; I refuse
to look him squarely in the eyes or speak
the dogged croaks of corvid tongue for fear
I will distort the shape his desire might
take when he watches his murder up and fly.
7.
Twilight clamors in the understory;
murmur of black birds unspools into hard
blue sky; vanishes against the amber
hillside; an ephemera of days piles
behind me as the frayed clouds race ahead;
by how they fade I know we do not want
anything truly lasting; when the wind
picks up blue pinyons drop curtains of snow,
pane of ice and sunlight; I want to go
weak in the knees and then proffer my bones.
I won’t wait for the final estrangement;
by then I will be lovely and nothing
entirely worth noticing; like those
golden coyotes I startled and who
then startled me coming down the mountain;
I love how they still shine in thick winter
coats, how they see me with indifferent
eyes while those who lay comatose suck air
in their rented beds and prepare to die.
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