Put your ribs into the wind when you say it.
Expose a pearl-bellied throat to the sky.
So many words for wrapping your mind around
the self, instead of your arms around the ankles
of another. Take me with you. Say it, and feel
that ache in the teeth, the one unlearned
as a child, when, in a snap for sweetness, you bit
front-teeth-first into ice cream. No, much better
to use the tongue like a spoon, or a thorn. Safer
to claim and puncture by approaching from the side.
Better to say I’ll come along too, or hey cool, I’m walking
that direction anyway, but never take me with you. Never
to show the heart so translucent and clear—an orb
of glass, burned and blown thin enough to shatter.
So much talk of abandon, but all along here is where
the word was pointing: the airy pause before an answer,
bones humming like a struck gong. Your pulse’s
trembling, pale and light, as the dusted wings of a moth;
as a milky circle of sea-foam on the beach,
the water rising ever closer to the spot where you
delicately, desperately sway.
This poem is from Courtney Kampa’s new book, A Bright and Borrowed Light.
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