My Book
This death inside, my skeleton,
paces the length of days, winter
and summer, blind. It hears nothing.
It comes no nearer taste than teeth
packed in ruts of jaw. Odors
of buildings, meadows, streets, bypass
the insensible rods of bone I carry,
that carry me.How shall I touch them?
Wherever I go on earth or water
or on bridges thrust over water, or higher
than that, in planes, or beneath the broad
surface of things, in caves or subways,
what is outside reaches and fills
the cavities of my body, space
in the circling passages of ear,
warm places where my breath rises
and falls, all soft zones of love
or waste or sense.
My darkest parts,
hollows invaded every time
and way I turn with different air,
keep their own secrets, are not mine,
are a new mystery, puzzling each breath
I take. Nothing I learn or love
is mine.
The only parts that live
finally are the unknowing bones,
the anonymous spaces they define
and this.Read it.
At dead center,
to which my body hurries, bone
grins with a grave rhetoric, and waits.