Peach Delphine

Here, amongst the candles

We sleep in privilege, no darkness
so dense as indifference,
we stuffed our mouths
with long ropes of moss from oaks
older than our great grandmothers,
there are no voices in these memories.

Anything not to utter truths
boiling up from the fire banked
on the hearth pulsing beneath
the grating of ribs, angle iron and hinges
of this frame, flesh is not form, breath
is not wind, a cistern of dankness
will not contain the wash of tears, seasonal
is not the word for despair as a mother
buries her child, or a friend rapturing
into absence, the blade of parting
is not reflection of Moon.

We embrace the mirror, not the shadow,
as if shade was not the better reflection,
Moon is both mirror and lens, a shell
hanging in the vault, sun bleached,
triton or conch, the long mollusks
of dreams glide through turtle grass of sleep,
sea fills our lungs, the slow drowning
of vigilance, the necessity of caution,
slick are the whetstones of our hands.

Mortality is the bonfire of all our broken furniture,
all the comforts of our days just more kindling,
smoke is not cloud, not sea mist
obscuring the horizon of all we have abandoned,
to know the name of each wave
as it fills the eye is to taste
the flowering wounds, where wind
clots with fragrance of gardenias and salt.

We cannot shed the pain of our birthing,
it clings to us, a viscosity
we cannot scrape from the form,
sinking bone deep, marrow pink,
there is a burning fathoms deep
where the molten heart pushes out,
cracking the sea momentarily,
it can be felt in stillness of sleep
a deeper fracturing, not quite seismic,
as necessary as breathing,
as gentle as moth.