The Offended Tinder
The Offended Tinder
I'll tell you straight, I saw a dead bird and dead birds have no business being in poems,
but we talk as if we were rolling sand through broken hourglasses, thanking each other kindly,
as if that oldest exhibition still mattered to us, the one staged by the first wise men of the world,
who were already measuring, back then, the open angle of silence at the corner of the mouth,
and pulling a tuning fork from the right ear, from the crooked nostril, from their own rotted mouths.
I also knew a photographer of the night, he'd catch you in a picture and say, look who you are,
and he was like a cursed sorcerer, because many stayed prisoners of that image their whole lives,
and my older sister listened to the price of milk on the radio and drew from it a prophecy
clearer than every observatory of the sky, she'd wait for me with her little stool at the gate,
at night, exactly when I came back from my own war, after years of desperate absence.
And once I cried for four hours straight, locked in my room, like any deeply offended man,
I held a watch in my hand and felt my soul drying up like a piece of wrung-out tinder,
and I wrote a poem that said something else entirely, but expressed exactly my hidden wound,
and I didn't read it to anyone for years, until I brought it, like an embrace, to a friend,
who listened to me in silence, then spoke to me about limits, about zones that must stay private.
He had the fine arguments of a frightened gentleman, he didn't like his offended soul being seen,
he kept cages sized to fit his own clipped wings, and believed that moving from one cage to another
meant freedom, and he spoke beautifully about love, waving his stumps through the air,
and I struck him lightly, there and there, and thought about chasing him off so I could cry again,
like a grown man, offended once more down to the smallest fragment of flesh and soul.
But all of this happened long ago, and now I sit quietly beside a dark water,
I was there even before the sun rose, my socks soaked with dew and with weather,
and I wrote this poem, good for me, since my sneakers have holes where the world's water gets in,
and good for the water, and good for the winter that's coming, and good for the tinder that burns slowly, without flame,
carrying inside it everything I never said, everything I lost, everything that still aches like an old wound.
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