The Desert of Open Sky Above Me

I wish my life were an almost
empty walking. Instead,

there are the sounds of birds
and insects which ricochet inside me

like light off the flat of a blade
or the flat blade of sun off snow

at noon. Inside me, there are men
in a circle throwing threats

at my chest like syringes.
I'm filled with the smell of extinct

campfires, long hallways,
and railroad tracks disappearing

into rain and smog. What I’m saying is
my mind’s a whorehouse,

a carnival of flesh, colored lights
and broken clocks, of pressures

and strange breaths against me
like ten thousand brief palms of air.

Where is the lake? Where
is the stone within which I can lie?

Let it be somewhere belowground.
The open sky fatigues me.

Here, the sun pulls everything
slowly apart. Its rays and waves

are fingers even into our hearts. You see,
there is only this reason for death:

every thing dismantles something else,
like the teeth of rain at the soil's face.

The sound of metal, grinding, the groans
of ancestors, the chest which grips the past

like a heart attack. The effort to retrace
mistakes, the waves which paw the sand.

After all this walking, this striving
to clear the sun’s bells from my eyes,

my ears, to make my head a remote branch
of a subterranean river – soon, I’m saying, -

I will be unwound like music
from a Victrola cranked too slow

in a room of gas lamps
and silent women dancing,

until their bodies are covered
with soot and the tiny splashes

of a piano upon their lips. But even then,
even after the women’s calves

and feet are still, and the birds rise
into the thick falling snow

and the insects burrow as if
preparing to become stone,

as men leave the campfire rings
one by one for the railroad tracks

which have disappeared beneath
the fingers of roots and moss' palms,

I fear my heart will not be silent.
The wind eddies in the sky above me.

Every emptiness captures sound.