← v18n1, Spring 2019
Poetry · Volume 18, Number 1

All Must

We hadn’t forgotten that all the tables

In the room had been recently bussed,

Nor that just before the marrow

From the ossibuchi slid onto tips

Of bread, and dust now’s on the candle wax

That had given us its light, all the better

To see the cancer their doctors said

They had, them, over there, next to

The other thems, and could we trace

The trade routes of these words,

A spontaneous flame in an unspontaneous

Desert, or the arrow we would like to

Follow if we could ever find it, perhaps

There, the tip hidden in someone’s head,

Traveling down someone else’s spine,

Hitting someone else’s heel, might that

Yarrow would be just one of the cure-alls,

Something to give belief to releafing

After seeing the paths covered with

Leaves, how we can try to manage to

Be anti-brief, asbestic, lungs full of thunder,

And the thunder full of us, when even

The metaphysical seems metastatic, the change

That clangs, the ex-votos lining the church walls

In Real de Catorce that day, us, through

The Ogarrio Tunnel into somewhere

Where air thrilled us, and where we would

Never go again, unless we were beckoned