Heartbeating Clay

I’m wide awake, my voice is a cracked rock. The dust seeps out, hard got and terrible. And Mary blinks at me from across the hall before we pass, derelict papers in her hand, like mutually it is our last day on earth. The thermometer plays crackers with the blood stream, cradles its own private vein filling… I have played every guitar in the world. Each has stained my fingers, dented them in, pushed the music deeper, close to the crooked heartache. Do you think stars are the eyes of our mothers looking back at us? As they go on their way into the deepening dim? I’ve been brave enough to push through the dark, too; without investment or destination. But I don’t want to be like the light up there hung, heaven intrepid in the universal splitting. I remember Uncle Flud rolling over on his mattress and letting it mark his fat somewhere else for once, as if in meeting a new part of himself through another surface he was finally ready to surrender and perish. It’s been years since we shot that beloved dog. I remember its face like the Latin word for a species of flower. All caught up in details that do not matter. Do you think this panting is indefinite? Do you think this ward has blunted me? Do you think tumours live in spite of us, not against us? I know a place above the sky, where angels come up for air and mist makes itself up. It’s thin and marble, dull, unpainted and throat. They will bring us there, when the basement floor meets the packets of autumn, and the loitering ship exits that seepy moat. They will put an automatic machine-gun in my crippled mouth and ask for crippled directions back to crippled home. They will reveal they have waited for generations. Granite eating rice cake, pulling mallards from the edge of the pond like they are film scenery. The banks with their boring, mournful furniture. We will act out the greatest bedroom, our hair falling grey, the night arriving in the phases of a mountain lying down. Our chests, pounding, moored to the lung wick, may collapse beneath skin breaded by time. July trembling, harmony overwriting harmony. And little Booker Smith, beaten in his own room, stomach of a village, sundial endless, sundial maternal, will cry at the table of his final feast, his meat fork like an instrument tuner for the instruments of dead animals. And the men who haven’t seen their own son’s lives play out pour through the world like fibreglass beginning, private and balding, sick to the openings of their unchanging shoes from watching theirs. And the crane in the river water feels the passages of currents, like it is love itself that washes by its orange, callous, ringlet ankles of iron. Feet webbed as if standing on filth is perfect. As if anything or anyone standing on ash is a perfect memory of fire. Chimney covering our pale skin with its space coloured entrails leading into the house. These few enemies of the natural world, their victories and defeats, rolled into straws of glue. Their skins breaded by time.