Untitled Poem

From: The Heart as Food, a series of meditations

142

Fishing this roiled, dark river, a black seam running directly out of my head or arising out of something huge, weeping itself out of existence, a kind of blood/black water churning through me, then away, like an oil slick of fragmented memories, and no fish in sight, the sky ending far off in another universe, the rubble of collapsed stars piled up, a place where no light enters…some days I cast no shadow, invisible to myself, a collection of irrelevant cells, the thought of all the words I’ve written slowly disintegrating, each letter falling away, my breath rising and falling, trying to fit just one poem into a place where it might be able to stay alive, wondering if the hollow chamber inside me will ever fill again, because I once beloved that words behaved like lightning, the soul weaving them
together, all that light splitting darkness.