I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.

It was not my fault, these animals
who once were lovers

it was not my fault, the snouts
and hooves, the tongues
thickening and rough, the mouths grown over
with teeth and fur

I did not add the shaggy
rugs, the tusked masks,
they happened

I did not say anything, I sat
and watched, they happened
because I did not say anything.

It was not my fault, these animals
who could no longer touch me
through the rinds of their hardening skins,
these animals dying
of thirst because they could not speak

these drying skeletons
that have crashed and litter the ground
under the cliffs, these
wrecked words.

People come from all over to consult me, bringing their limbs which have unaccountably fallen off, they don’t know why, my front porch is waist deep in hands, bringing their blood hoarded in pickle jars, bringing their fears about their hearts, which they either can or can’t hear at night. They offer me their pain, hoping in return for a word, a word, any word from those they have assaulted daily, with shovels, axes, electric saws, the silent ones, the ones they accused of being silent because they would not speak in the received language.

I spend my days with my head pressed to the earth, to stones, to shrubs, collecting the few muted syllables left over; in the evenings I dispense them, a letter at a time, trying to be fair, to the clamouring suppliants, who have built elaborate stair-cases across the level ground so they can approach me on their knees. Around me everything is worn down, the grass, the roots, the soil, nothing is left but the bared rock.

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

I made no choice
I decided nothing

One day you simply appeared in your stupid boat,
your killer’s hands, your disjointed body, jagged
as a shipwreck,
skinny-ribbed, blue-eyed, scorched, thirsty, the usual,
pretending to be—what? a survivor?

Those who say they want nothing
want everything.
It was not this greed
that offended me, it was the lies.

Nevertheless I gave you
the food you demanded for the journey
you said you planned; but you planned no journey
and we both knew it.

You’ve forgotten that,
you made the right decision.
The trees bend in the wind, you eat, you rest,
you think of nothing,
your mind, you say,
is like your hands, vacant:

vacant is not innocent.