Unfastened

Unnamed November 22, 2008

Already the body holds a new language, muffled
and then sharp with longing. Children hanging from rafters.
Empty hallways, rooms where the homeless sleep.

A house like a nest you don’t wish to leave,
then like a prison of glass. You’ve been told in the past
there was no such indulgence. A house was a house.

A birth was a birth:  sometimes easy, sometimes not.
The taste of iron deep in your teeth, you wake up reluctant.
Through test upon test – heartbeat, blood, bones, sex –

you hold like a levee, you hold like the tracks
of an unswerving train, a stone around a softening center,
where something flutters to speak .