ABORTED WORDS

ABORTED WORDS

In the Chiapas dust I have found stone

And from beneath the moon's gibbous face; bone.

Owl's feathers candle the sky into flight,

And the lactating stars witnessed that night,

A marriage blanket. We built a landscape,

Imagined futures to harvest and rape,

Though dew on the grass is primordial,

And memory transmuted into glass, real

As blood—the things said that cannot be undone.

And love we have killed before its begun,

Comes back to haunt us in our dreams, like birds

To ply the Icarus inside us with words.

In dust I've found the ancestor of stone.

It is this life we choose to live alone. 

2/27/1989 


(I think this was written in Alberto Blanco's workshop. Alberto was my guest poet at Mark West School, where I had a CAC grant. All these poems have a 2/27/ date so I wasn't in Chiapas! Slowly recreating the timeline.)