Our bodies are a sign that time once made
its home in us, we are connected to time
the way the earth wears the orbit of the moon,
and light is how time communicates, feeling
is memory distilled to its purest form:
don’t you remember how the evening
wouldn’t let go of all that blue, how your tongue
woke salt from its sleep? In the space made sacred
by bone and steel, does the cold still offend you,
what is the velocity of silence,
does your night correspond to our night,
are we foreign now, do the things we touch
turn to light, and is this how we feel
the presence of time, not by remembering
but by touching? In a dream you found
your mother’s house, you stood by the door
but she couldn’t let you in, the dream
resisted you. You were never at home
in the body, it’s weighed with longing,
its needs too soon extinct. You lit a candle
across the water until the wind gave up
and let you pass: by mere insistence
you could have saved the world. No one
saw you, no one pulled you out of the sulfur,
but the dying still walk miles to it,
in their minds already healed. You’ve taken
everything that’s failed, dream, memory,
the soul displaced from its ecliptic,
into a kind of heaven, a sovereign
indifference. You entered it with your body
all on fire. Dusk was nesting in winter’s trees.
The hours burned away. Nothing was spared.