Cuboid Bone

by

Rebecca Reynolds

 

You are a tiny left-over hank with cuneiform and holes.
If I address you like a human, it is because I imagine you
can feel. Because you are inside me and because you
are human
and I will ride you home
and you will feel me but I will be tiny too
and say walk. Click click. Instead
I don’t know why I speak, why my silence
is not enough, imagining colors to each metatarsal
or fire from the groove shooting us star ward
to the proxima Centauri, Wolf 359, Luytuns, Sirius, and Procyons.
We are ever smaller. When the refugees are drowning
and the universe of water has no feeling
because the poets and critics of poets say water doesn’t feel
I feel sorry for the water, for the water
must hold your shoes, your denim and histories. The sisters
singing out to the water, they too forget how little feeling there is
in the things we imagine, in the goddamn flowers
and the trash, keeping its lonely cartons. Once
that meant something. My fingers spoke. My alphabet had colors. Each number
could be soothing or loathsome. The elms bled pollen and crap
from the sparrows
who ate the berries we couldn’t eat from the weeds or holly
and my mother said it does not make the birds sick
but they are not angels.    

 


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