THE EVANESCENCE
Like looking at a field from a shaking train
With yellow light smudged
And smeared in the distance.
The dark trees blurred in the wind
And the earth was always rushing past.
Resembled Abraham’s dream:
He carried a small body
Trembling in his arms,
A sweet kid dipped in blood
For a terrible meat-eating God.
By the lingering memory of darkness,
But the gulls—the bloodthirsty gulls—
Called us back to the shore.
Walk with me a while
In the black and blue wake of night.
Over the scumbling waves.
A beach littered with debris,
A sky scribbled with erasures,
And a watery sun floating away.
How does anyone ever sleep?
Radiant, luminescent—
Tilting on one wing
And skimming the shoreline
Just as it was getting dark.
Look. I swear I saw it.
Dissolving into a red sea.
There were insect creatures
Chasing us, there were metallic birds…
The sea parted for us, love.
But then it was soaked in blood.
And pictured the barbed wire fences.
The air was thick with testimonies
Written in red ink.
I had not witnessed the violence,
But violence remembered me.
That we felt dizzy studying it.
The day was gray and abstract
Like looking at the sky from a shaking train.
We had brushed against the light,
We had been brushed by evanescence.
