Joshua Marie Wilkinson
City, Phantom, Quays
Your brilliantine, sickly, brings me
back & this is a peculiar quarry
beveling the ocean: a city coerced
to renovate our longing, or at least
withdraw the news-carrying birds
until the stalled moon tries us on
in the movie it’s making, making
us hold so still in the accordion-pulled light.
I am only part of what comes back. In leaving,
I am of the bridges & overspill which reveal
the rivers you yourself have been inscaping.
Naughty quays, I am stooped like you
asked, lying on the carpet of the bookstore now,
gallons of me cut quietly like a slough through
locks.
What I have completed makes us both up
into dummies. You are the horse traffic, I am
the slipshod fortress.
No more boys. No more night.
No more memory to replace the curtains.
No more floorboards to wax or
calumny between us. Another duskbat
from your trees develops as an insignia
among the children, the tugboats
retire, barges learn of us.
The raised graveyards, too, learn of what we’ve flooded or opened
with the last of our whispering & coins. |
