Unterberg Poetry Center

There Are Parts of Myself I Have Watched Die

As if it is a kind of strength to hold something down
and slit its throat.
 
I have died three times in this poem, already.
The truth is, there is a river after death and I see it move
 
toward me, frothing in its shape of lemon wedges.
 
I seek truth in the surfaces that glint beneath eyelids
carrying a heavy lash. I close my eyes
 
and pray a good prayer.
 
I would rather see the pleating river than the knives
my neighours hold.
 
I would not call it strength how a man can lace up another man
and hang him by his religion,
 
how a moon can call another moon “blood.”
Yes, I have died three times in this poem by your hand.
 
The river speaks in whistles and stones; it says that perhaps
I have always been a visitor.
 
It carries away its marrow and driftwood,
and sometimes my body stripped of its bleating.
 
I wonder, did I swim on a current and cut through this border?
Did I knock over a jar
 
of thirty-three prayers into a kitchen of hanging moons?
 
Or perhaps, what the river really said
is that I can only stay a visitor for so long.
 
With each death, I become ghostly, ghostlier—
a mistranslation
 
that slips through a heart chewing its prairie grains,
a heart bred on western winds,
 
a heart that is almost a noose.
 
I have killed myself three times in this poem, already,
but only a single face fades at a time.
 
The river taught me once about belonging
and I turned those lessons into a grave.

Manuscript