pact

Pact

I believe there is a voice with no skin on it in all of us.          

                                                                       Stephen Berg

                                                                       Notes on “Nothing in the Word/Aztec Songs”

it’s the only way to shout to the wind I suppose

or at it when the last of every thing of you I could ever

touch is taken back and the only other pair

of eyes living in the room just stare and stare

and give way like two feet unprepared

for ice, how one heel’s the first to slip

and its comic really it always gets some

kind of laugh how whoop! it’s not up in the air

really so much as a brief lead, of a dance

partner who dips and betrays the commitment

and steps back to watch his whole damn lie

Jesus what sort of man is that to abandon

I mid-dip and then...isn’t that all about power

how happy happy we come along and then

it’s all dashed like brains off the cliffs in

Mauthausen the way to carry stones up those one

hundred and eighty three steps against

the brittle bones and then slip or be forced to...

Maybe that’s not what I’m getting at watching

you die I mean to say while it’s all going down

there’s some compact made with the air

because we weren’t born birds we have

to crash the wind takes a piece of us for itself

a cut say a lender’s fee and maybe

falling like that--accident or not--is sanity

in a bassinet is new to the moon as brief

as the keep because something’s bound

to weight us down something’s bound to

break us through and maybe that shard

of bone broke on the stone is the dust 

offered up and that random wind we scream

into after we’re taken down like hay

before the blade is our way of saying

There is no God there is a God there is no

god there is and it stays like that it stays

a bit of it anyway until we stand again

and mark a path with crosses and make

a pact with salt with backbone with ridicule

with innocence with the eyes of the living

and the dead looking out at the same

fucking thing and whispering to each, all four

of them, and the keeper’s keys jingle at the hip

after the door’s closed and locked and she

walks, or being dead, floats, just above the stone

pavements, away.