Читать книгу The Nine Senses - Melissa Kwasny - Страница 19

Nettle

for Patricia Goedicke

Green clusters of soft beads, the nettle is flowering. When I disappear, you said, write and tell me everything. Snakes slide, when they hear my footsteps, further into the weeds. The tide shudders as it turns over each stone. Is this what it was like as earth began to end? It started out in loneliness and turned to poetry. Here: a scribble of seabirds, a peak across the Sound, so distant and vague, like your death to me. Last night, an Iranian doctor performed that tongue-cry she had heard the Arabs use at weddings and funerals. She had examined Fidel Castro and pronounced him fit, four times more charismatic than Clinton. Somehow, I thought you would want to know. Everyone is starting to take on the appearance of ghosts. Rain tips the needles of the cedar. If our days are the ritual we perform for the dead. If our days are the ritual we perform for the dead. I wade into the current and leave it open for you. I find excuses to say your name.