The Seventh Mansion

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For Danielle

Is it true

the earth is all there is, and the earth does not last?

………………………………………………………

Living brings you to death, there is no other road.

—GALWAY KINNELL, “Lastness”

You are on the road or parts of you are on the road you are in two pieces. Blood into the ground, into the dirt, boot near your eyes, someone digging. White fur on meat beside you it is also in pieces soaking some of itself back up. Someone will eat that meat but not you, you are waiting for a different mouth, earth blacker beneath the spade, blacker and blacker the deeper down you go. You and your head. You are just a boy. They put the knife in your hand you would not touch the lamb. Not even to save yourself so the dirt goes right on top, shut your face. Blood left on the stones. On their boots. What a splash you made and now this, all of it on you, in you, covering you, the dirt, the smell of it, it will degrade you, shed the flesh from the bone, the eye from its socket, the heart from its nest of rib, packed hard, you didn’t make a sound. Not a single sound. Your life flying up against the sky. Oh, my God. And the legs of the lamb are dragged over you and the boots drag over you and the carts and the roads on top of this road many times over no one knows. You are here. A body losing its blood a head untethered a hand bound behind its back. A boy dragging his sword into the woods waiting to be saved trying to save himself