Hey, I wrote a poem....

Very fresh first draft, although I've been toying with this image for a while, since I got stuck on Florence + the Machine, particularly the song Blinding. I could get out a line or two, but that was it. It is tricky being feeling inspired by something so complete, but staying within that space. The lyric that the title is from is actually 'no more calling like a crow for a boy/for a body in a garden.'




Crawling For a Boy Through The Garden

I keep seeing her: in a garden she made a graveyard:
clawing at the dirt, getting
nowhere;
getting her hair tangled,
her skin saturated with the dew of a sweat less
coolant for the midnight Missouri-August limbs
than expurgation of the spastic heartbeat
from the vagus nerve that won't leave the heart
of her heart, or the heart of her head alone.
Either
way, I keep seeing her in the flowerbed
in a satin and lace nightgown, whiter
than what Saint Agnes always dreamt God
took Mary to bed in, and the heat
of her trenching hands plowing through the ground
leaves her skin lined with Bahraini pearls, nacreous
in the same loving spotlight of a half moon
that gives bats unabashed flight and lets teenage girls
sneak out second-story bedroom windows: makes
half-living repenters into conductors
of a kinesis they and their lovers and their doctors
thought was killed in the questionably successful
exorcism of the guilt that landed them
in the bed, in the office,
in the first place.

I know but I don't know how I know
there is a man dressed from collar
to ankle bones in his marital suit just
a few feet below her dirty knees and nails.

I don't know how I don't know
why she put him there:
sewed his
eyes shut with mismatched buttons,
sealed his lips closed with wax
from their wedding candle
and embossed the drying tallow
with the young family crest
of her own mouth.
I don't know
why I know how he didn't hurt
her and I don't know how I know
why she thinks if she didn't
save him when she raked over
his burial bed,
she can do it now:
wash the dirt off
with rose water and
dry the skin with
Mexican frankincense.
She
can make
him
breath again
if she can get her hands beneath
the grave ground.