my bones fly out around me,

disheveled, pricked by wind, in pain,

and I stand back unshocked.

I read of it in mystic reports,

gossip columns well-known not for veracity,

but for imagination and an odd sense of familiarity.

 

I have not met my limbs,

but am told of them by

unreliable, unquestionable agents

who circle like missionaries or salesmen,

grinning madly, waving charts written

in a new language which they must teach me,

which I learn, which breaks my body

in new ways around a cruel grammar

of cause, effect, and change.

 

a dictionary of differences, my body

is an unhappy monument to conflict,

a final scrap of the world before dead peace.

my body will no longer abide the terrible

machinery of discordant striving,

it will grow desperate and unify,

pull parts together across blind space,

it will step beyond organs, single.

it will become alone.

 

my body will adopt all witnesses

and discover a ruinous temple built beyond praise.

and it will cry out, alarmed, friendless,

and scatter itself abundantly,

once more disunited,

attempting to forget.

 

all worlds are

smoke hanging

out of sight.