It astounds me the ways
I scale the sky. Every day I have to
relearn my body.
Who will tell us to the world?
Our children whose heads we breathe into
like seashells casting those spells
our mothers once wooed us with?
A playground where we became the mist
hanging over everything?
We knew it was our insides
tugged inside out at last.
Once when I was a boy on the dodge
hopping fences, I let my leg hang over the lip
to that other world. I stopped
on top of that wobbly fence,
and hit the pause button on the world.
I held it all: the shadows from the plum tree
whose fruit we used to peg cars with;
the dust from my father’s broom;
even the boys chasing after me.
I knew the time was passing
and took even the shadows of the branches
into those pockets God had sewn
into my body for the traveling.
I kissed the moment flush
on the mouth then let it go,
surrendered again to the earth
with silencers on my tennis shoes.
Maybe time itself came brushing
the trail behind me until it vanished
clean off the grass, and I took up residence
with all the other balloons
floating along the landscape.
Let me slip into a life less messy.
Returning to one of my long-time favorites, Ada Limón (1976-), with this poem from her stunning 2015 collection, Bright Dead Things.
“The Noisiness of Sleep”
Careful of what I carry
in my head and in my hollow,
I’ve been a long time worried
about grasping infinity
and coaxing some calm
out of the softest part
of the pins and needles
of me. I’d like to take a nap.
But not a nap that’s eternal,
a nap where you wake up
having dreamt of falling, but
you’ve only fallen into
an ease so unknown to you
it looks like a new country.
Let me slip into a life less messy.
Let me slip into your sleeve.
Be very brave about my
trespass, the plan is simple—
the plan is the clock tower
and the lost crow. It’ll be rich.
We’ll live forever. Every moon
will be a moon of surrender
and lemon seeds. You there,
standing up in the crowd,
I’m not proud. The stove
can’t boast of the meal.
All this to say—consider this,
with your combination of firefly
and train whistle, consider this,
with your maze and steel,
I want to be the rough clothes
you can’t sleep in.
There’s a name for the animal love makes of us
Nicole Sealey’s beautifully unflinching exploration of life, death, and the marrow between keeps moving to the top of my stack this April. You can find this poem in her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named—her collection Ordinary Beast will be out this fall.
“Object Permanence”
(For John)
We wake as if surprised the other is still there,
each petting the sheet to be sure.
How have we managed our way
to this bed—beholden to heat like dawn
indebted to light. Though we’re not so self-
important as to think everything
has led to this, everything has led to this.
There’s a name for the animal
love makes of us—named, I think,
like rain, for the sound it makes.
You are the animal after whom other animals
are named. Until there’s none left to laugh,
days will start with the same startle
and end with caterpillars gorged on milkweed.
O, how we entertain the angels
with our brief animation. O,
how I’ll miss you when we’re dead.
live in the layers 