After years riding in the wilderness
I come to the city
after a war has ended.
It is the middle of the night.
The city breathes
like my horse out of breath
against my thighs.
All the soldiers
are dead or wounded.
Inside the hospital
nurses unravel bandages
from their eyes
to clean them, so the city
tastes of blood
meeting water in a basin.
A silence has eaten
through the city
like a flood through a cathedral—
the kind of devotion
that scours a building’s bones
to nothing.
I have been silent
for very long, having no god.
Violent, unmerciful.
my tongue rode up my throat:
an outlaw come back,
carrying in a satchel
a bloody heart, the truth
I would tell a man.
Any one of them.
If he had ears.
Could walk to the door.