Mónica Gomery

Whatever it was

I thought the end of my twenties

 

would amount to, I was wrong

about that. The end

 

of my twenties are about

death and the way death drapes

 

itself sparkling over our lives.

People are falling away

 

from us, people are peeling

and tumbling away.

 

The ground calls our names

in its sweet soil voice, the song

 

of our names rising up

from the ground like the smell

 

of hot bread lifting

out of its crust.

 

People are falling away

from us and I have come

 

to love the darkness of night

like I loved you, like a lover

 

whose eyes carve me

into the shape of myself

 

when they look. Everything

extraneous is burning away

 

but it is not graceful

it is a gift of sharp blade

 

the end of my twenties

is the surgeon survival

 

of death cutting back

what I no longer need.

 

Someone told me to speak

from my scars, not my wounds

 

which feels true when my body

leans away from the people

 

whose loved ones

are dying because I am

 

breathless when death

touches death in the night.

 

Is a wound too raw

to speak from?

 

I am sorry

your loved ones are peeling away

 

but really I

am not sorry.

 

At the end of my twenties I learned

that one single night can be as long

 

as a handful of years

that a wound is a story

 

that stories have names

and when I catalogue it

 

this night

will bear your name

 

alongside an index called

Kinds Of Crying, which include:

 

Ecstatic, Furious, Longing,

Disbelief. Someone told me

 

to speak from my scars

not my wounds, which might explain why

 

I am not ready to converse with

the newly bereaved, because

 

when I bump into them in this long

crackling darkness my wound

 

heaves its great fist over my

tongue and only my eyes tell

 

the truth. When I catalogue it

this night will be called The End

 

Of My Childhood and

it will be called Our Beauty and Terror

 

it will be called

What We’re Here To Do.

 

I’m not sure though if I agree

about the scars and the wounds

 

because at the end of my twenties

it is my hand reaching

 

into the mouth of the wound

to pull forth each word

 

to place it against the blank page

where it cools and solidifies

 

and isn’t that maybe the way a scar

forms? And the sweet song

 

of the earth

beckoning

 

all of us

back.

 

====

 

SEASON OF ELEGY
Monica Gomery

 

The graduate students shuffle their papers. The hungry raccoon is digging for chestnuts. The chestnut trees drink carbon out of the sky. The action-blast trumpets through pixels to say Come out come out, no pipeline no pipeline, civil disobedience can keep our waters from burning! The activist schedules her speaking tour. The radio show reports a battle for fracking on the floor of the House. The lightning storm sparks Minnesota. The First Nations alliance issues a statement on sacred water and women’s safety as casualties of the pipeline. The urban farmer is digging for garlic. The middle-school yard houses an untended orchard planted a hundred years ago during a public commons initiative. The pear tree grows despite its un-pruning. The banker considers joining the compost collective. The reporter tweets from the rally. The lobbyist for the dairy industry walks her dog on the lake. The police arrest a teenaged boy on a boulevard built along an 1816 treaty line between a native community and a colonial army. The grandmother writes down her recipe. The coalition for clean air drops a banner over the freeway. The energy company raises its prices. The muralist mixes his paint. The filmmaker loads a new reel. The students are digging for soil samples. The geese knit the sky with their callings. The logger takes a second job at an international bank. The badger gets under the fence. The hazelnut trees drink carbon out of the sky.