God
Knows the Difference Between the Living and the Dead
The afternoon you took
your life your soul stripped
its clothes off in the street.
The street stripped its soul
from the afternoon
you took yourself from.
You spoke to the nakedness
of the afternoon, bent your knees
to its sudden darkening
of breath. You darkened
your knees with the nakedness
your breath bent to, spoke.
Everyone saw this as a sign
of your soul flying
toward the cracked bowl
of the sky. Everyone saw
the sky as a bowl cracked
by your soul.
And they prayed as though
praying would cut your body
through.
And they prayed your body
would cut through praying,
would grow skin,
feathers, blossoms
of consciousness of
your coming sin.
A consciousness of feathers,
they would say. Your soul
coming to new skin.
Twine and Needle
Shortly after my birth, my face shattered to pieces.
When surgeons attempted to construct a new one, each attempt fell to
the floor like
exhausted porcelain.
My mother persuaded them to sew the shards of the original into a tessellation,
but they were thin as eggshell, crumbled when
touched.
For my first few months, my face remained unspoken.
I breathed through small holes in my skin where my nose had been, ate
through
what was my mouth.
My mother called this everything she didn't feel.
A made thing with no owner is a preface, requires a signature.
An artist, finding a lost body in his palette, merely extends this body's
figuration
on canvas, signs the bottom in thick paint.
The day your father looks you in the eye and says "daughter"
is a birthday.
For some, this discovery can stay hours, days, the stretched cataract
of years,
in the guilty ridges of a father's tongue.
When I was one, you took the hinge of my jaw in your hand; whispered
the secrets
of suture, twine, and silver needle; watched
my face ripen like a late orchid.
Home
You lie in your bed like the peach
tree fallen in the front yard:
trunk drowsing in unpredictable weather.
It is still early. You hear Mother
in the living room as she bends and strains.
It is like listening to a river that heads
toward the sea, small whisper
of water arguing change.
Fresh to salt. Water only finding
its face when it moves. She is already
with child, and only she knows.
What she doesn't, that your son
is four hours away and basking
in the summer your dark features
have given his face. That his mother
is your wife. He is only two but has learned
to watch the sky for changes,
for clouds to throw the sun's shine down.
He takes inventory: every day
a different animal. Every night
what disappears into constellation
or consolation. Animals and objects
don't keep his attention long.
Like you he only looks briefly
to soft excuses, soft things.
Memento Mori
You were already spoken for.
Your blood, now, only negotiable evidence.
I digress through its blanks.
Make them epic.
Don't listen to me,
my narrator is non-negotiable.
She is only waiting to crush
the Fates, write of the way
their taught bodies devolve
in her fists. She will turn their murders
into centers of vision, scented letters
sealed with wax, rosebuds.
Copyright © 2007 Sara Henning
