Small Songs of the Body

I

I could say you are not made of this light.

Could say I know the soft violence of a mirror

when I lean into it, into just one more wrong image

of myself in a wrong body. I could say

your circlet of gold will not let you free

from your name, but I am not that sort of pessimist.

Still, it won’t. I could say their cold

mouths will call you as you call you.

I could say the subjunctive will collapse,

but who am I to speak of grammar’s half-life.

I would speak aloud to you, if the man’s voice

leaving this body were not a chain around my throat.

I would say you could define yourself, if the chain

around your foot bone were not ripping you out of life.

II

The birdless trees painted into reflection—

more water than tree. The water

more mirror than water, with only a slight

dip below earth to reassure us we are not

mistaken to see as we see, to be

as. Poplars in a row bend at unlike angles,

interrupt expectation. How do I say

this is not enough for our eyes? A sky

bodied other than as thought.

Reflected off canvas, Lili sees herself

in the eyes of a man wanting

her to be a man, still in the body

of a man, and understands he is painting

over her, through her. Is painting himself.

III

Feathers darkling drunk with another new perception, not even feathers.

A kiss on the side of a wall, of an unseeable wall, tenderness against lifeless vision.

A body in relation to the word body on a frail surface, absent.

And the body absent, but there is always a body—anatomy of an alphabet.

I do not know whether the eagle is perched on a box or has burst forth into gray.

Aperture—like an eyelid—separating a moment into only light and not light.

All photographs are fading.

Tell me, what does a photograph capture—why we use the word capture rather than represent.

Not a single camera can represent me, can see me.

There, a man on a park bench kissing a person in a man’s body, not even a man’s body.

And still. And, still.

When did the wind lose a body in which to breathe?

I was mistaken, the man on park bench had been erasing

yet another person with his lips.