Now, I love poems as much as the next girl. Okay, I might love poems a little more than the next girl. I don't really know how the next girl feels. But this poem - this one - it made me hold my breath a little. And sigh involuntarily. Dionne Brand is magical.
From thirsty
This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets,
pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as
thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick,
as empty elevators
let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in
eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops
of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and
held
the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half-dead
hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the
habitual grey-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I
anticipate nothing as intimate as history
would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken
things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain,
would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how
water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates
a breath
and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in
prosthetic
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of
what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a
glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed
From thirsty, by Dionne Brand
Copyright © Dionne Brand, 2002
Lovely. PW
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