"let me get in there"

the inside of my mouth tastes like metal.
i know i smell like you do

when you're fearing.
i turn up a wolf's nose
at your pale frown
and shaky staining palms, but the grief

pooling under your face
bones is the loneliness that i ultimately run to
and then return from
     knowing
we can devour each other
with a kindness foreign to animals.

so that my body is also a lumpen thing full of buried treasure

In Logan Square I found the moon on the sidewalk,
yellow from being tossed about the street
y the wind.
The light
struck me. I cut a lintel. Fixed it over my chest.

I find a kinship in our muteness. I can't discuss
the unspeakable. Many of my precious objects
are cuts to the cord coiled inside,
and I soak my strings in blood
to wrap up tighter in my crust.

A while back hope crept through
beak unweaving
to sleep like a dove in the twine-dulled
razorwire of my guts.

The thing stopped singing, never woke

(until) the power of windowing the cocoon took over,
and in extremity
the moon's open eye was song






                                For Judith Scott