Peripheries

This is the process I see now, internal rupture

as through a streaked microscope,

how light outside the body breaks off into nothing.

Last night I watched the sky

slip from its definition of blue, then pale

to the edges

of dried skin flaking from a hand, taut lines

like the veined strings

holding an orange’s flesh together. Something

inside me is unraveling,

blood the wrong ratio, diminished without me

knowing. So I wanted to believe

whatever makes up the horizon hasn’t changed

once since I last looked,

or since the first time I recognized a color

in it—child view from a small bed,

startled awake in the middle of night, winter

darkness purpled by light pollution

and sharp angles of branches. That sky can’t be

repeated. Time pulls the cells from us

and last night held none of its old colors.

Instead the tips of branches

were almost orange where they met the emptying

sky. I needed its glow to transfer

to the underside of my skin and hollows

of bone to understand

the disappearance of cells, this betrayal of parts,

to watch my body’s light fail.