Eclipse the Light & Crudely Divide by Amy King

Milk is a mythical moth that sees its own heart, mostly
in summer. Some kind of pillow moves me too
and dissolves my palate; I cannot taste
the shabby white wings
and behold each shadow’s infancy
beneath the definition of sleep.
I’m the kind of person who rides between towns
in terra cotta music, green’s death beat
turning air into earth, a Roman ruins kind of day, impolitic.
Blank sheets of ice to float on appear,
saving me from my lackluster heart, a platter adrift,
so that to carry you is
my only dark sleeve
essayed to reduce the people of things.
You say you know me, understand my ways,
but people love their homes, their locks that work
both ways. My hands are the in ’s that tremble
out the beats of verbatim, infection, bacterial electrics.
Roused, I was reading a book that fell
from your hands while we paddled,
completing the myth of our symmetry.
It held many pages and was a prefix
to our relations.
I am the gruntwork and a mystery of the gruntwork
precedes the masks along the entrails
reflecting our lives. Stand here in the rain
on this coral shelf, hold out for land.
We’ll make way if we eclipse the light
and crudely divide, dissolution of the mewing
across the decks of countless ships, home to the anti-us.

by Amy King

published in NOO Journal

photo of Columbus Circle by T. Scott Carlisle