Читать книгу The Nine Senses - Melissa Kwasny - Страница 14

Shell

Bluff and double bluff. We could make ourselves sick waiting for this place to open up to us. Polished by our childhoods. Bruises the waves leave. Shell: skinned knee, scraped marble. We know too much about process to try to get around it. What is vital is sometimes hidden inside bone. Bramble of the blackberry that blocks the entrances. As if we weren’t meant to be here, though here we are outside, loud-colored to the heron. Morbid, the idea of rubbing through one’s own skin, yet we yearn to stick our fingers inside. While the dead make their way through the custom lines. Shell: a quiet verb, slowed by its own sound, gull wings dipping over the clam beds. What if they disappeared, these sculpted, painted things? What would we do without their number, their secret congress? This thinking placed outside ourselves has gotten us here, an interior flame-soft, brushed against a cloud, small cloud of bleeding things, gray feathers.