Swallowed Light by Michael Wasson

Author:Michael Wasson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

its frame to build

a window back in-

to the world. Had this body

been held after all

these years, I would enter

you to find my frozen self

& touch. Like the gutted animal

we take

in offering. & live.

SELF-PORTRAIT TOWARD A FUGUE [NO. ___ IN ___♭ MINOR]

Even in my wildest dreams, there I am

held in the arms of my country: a country leaving

me with the crushed shine of a man’s shadow: where I am

a boy again surrounded by my god’s

failure of a forest: where the bodies of men are

silhouettes slipping their fingers

down my throat: I say I will change the world

in my wildest dreams—which means the bullets loaded

in my mouth are only teeth: & only crooked teeth

& not the white lilac-

like stains leading me to a window: so clear

in my wildest dreams, my hands are like this:

gone—fingerprints the braille of a mouth

reading touch & moving like sound emptied

into a perfectly rounded hole: in my wildest dreams

I forget the colors left behind

my eyelids: & the blinking of every eye-

witness—the murderers held so close

I swear they’re in my hands: in the window

my skin is turned to

a human-hollowed doorway—I shatter

what light has done to me: in my wildest dreams

where the given body is a form of flight

& in this latest version I step into

the wreckage—to find the other side of

me blooming toward you.

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