—In the almost city of new joy you lay awake.
Open up dark me, you said (having waited),
part that lives on the inside of statues
holding those poses
half-covered with reverse dust,
part that barely lives,
open up open up open up, you said,
(because you knew how much activity lives in the night,
the rats, thrumming
and thrumming their violin ways up the sides of dawn,
new roses climbing
up the edge of fiddle this and fiddle that)
And the dark me said
I can’t come right now let me put on further shadows
I am a torn thing—
The dark boys were wakeful so you asked them
The sad boy the mad boy the see-you-later
sailors sailing backward
track marks under their tans
husbands of people brothers of people the wild boy
the spinning man
the dream pirate who loved night so well
he had to stir tomorrow in his coffee . . .
There was a branch scraping so you blamed it,
its thorns advanced by little yellow roses.
Civilization was scraping so you blamed it
(tearing the female from himself and the male from herself;
there was a branch scraping between worlds so you blamed it
and the day people slept on their thoughts,
the branch scraped midnight
because the noon ones slept.
So o.k., maybe it. Maybe nature
wasn’t always such a good mom. Maybe she was sick
of doing whites in her laundry. Maybe
she was a he—
(Try this sentence backward
: he a was she maybe) Dirty boy-boy.
Raccoons searched through the garbage can,
pulling out chicken bones, live sandwiches,
the little bloody pad
of black black purple-black black female blood
—What did he want that for,
his eyes were ringed with it—
and the owl did its four note call
from ahead of the wrinkled moon:
(dirty) who-who . . (dirty) who-who . . .
Branch scraping.
Branch scraping again. It made the sound
of missingness, like you. It made
the sound of tiny eiffel towers on their sides.
But was it the dark girl
or the dark boy self you were missing.
Doesn’t matter what it was about. Dirty moon-moon. Little
drugged missionary stars came out.
So you took their advice and stayed awake in half
as in a tunnel where you are the only one
going the opposite way,
—not so yellow, not so open,—
you come out and the trees have split
between the past with its type of fire
and the future with its,
you can burn through one sweet branch at a time,
you can gather up the branches with your large large heart
but you’re not going to be one thing, ever again—