after Connor Colbert
it could have been all wrong from the start. which is to say i
stepped off the bus greygreen as water & the cold air couldn’t cure me (still cannot
in the dead freeze of midwestern february) &, i must emphasize,
neither did seeing the deer with their noses to crabapples (enough
to nearly obscure the grass) that
had fallen into the slick leaves, neither did their soft flanks, neither did my
circling thoughts attempting to unspiral the body
from illness to wonder at the shade of brown along their legs (is
it really only brown and not some other word more golden? a
red otherwise reserved for the space just along the land as touched by sun? how badly
all language paints)—or the grey light gone pink as if designed
only to filter through the thin cartilage of their ears. poorly
dreamed, all of this, but you have to know: if you too had been put
there in october rain in a sick body no one called sick, together
all of your atoms & the deers’ & the apples’ & especially the leaflitter would become all one vessel
—a telescope or magnifying glass: an instrument of harboring
images in the eye, and in memories—and these
slides project still through my diminishing
brain. it could have been all wrong, so
the brain learned to mythologize. called
a body good and imagined life within it. vital
storytelling, to dare utter a sentence in which organs
gurgle steadily along with electricity, so much you never imagine them at all. i
meant to tell you, i have lived and seen hope
and deer and orchards whose rainblack trunks reach straight through my
mouth (here, see what i'm doing, getting it wrong again. not the mouth—my heart)
they reach straight through my heart. a poem goes
only as long as a thought: i had been living in this body, but you should know the deer came first.