BY LAURA-GRAY STREET
The Brink of Bones
These your bones are flaking paint from all that
bushwhacking through, your thoughts feathering
a cascade, a tentacled froth. What will you wrap
yourself in today? What are you going to hang
in the trees and swing from on your long arms?
What frond will you open as far as you can,
as far as a garden hose unwinds, as a wind-
blown garbage bin rolls down the street into
underbrush? How much can you wager for
a taste, a hint of airborne molecules that will
arrest you, capture you, turn you entirely?
Seize this new direction with your every clever
and zeal as it draws you to a row of lights
blinking on the horizon: red, green, left, right.
Seasons of eons pass like leviathans, silent,
hardly visible. Swim past, climb clear,
follow your heart, your crotch, your beak,
your pheromones beyond the pale, over
the moon, into a seat at the table. You are
intent on timing the market, collecting coupons
and free cartons. What stark carving you are,
oh, boxed one, lid angled off in the rakish
way of top hats. You are but a song and dance
away from the bed frame. Splintered, tattered,
plucked, iambic-limp, scent-sotted entity.
Tongued muscle flexed, extending, reaching
like an elephant’s trunk, like twilight in the jungle
of summer climbing over the jungle gym. Tensile,
tensed, gentle now. A study in hope. Handicraft
dangling from the uppermost skeletal edge,
the child of vines. How far will you carry
this? How long can you hold on? As long
as it takes. Until new coordinates arrive.
“Nearby Super-Earth Likely a Diamond Planet”
—Science Daily
Since you’ve discovered in this milky way
a planet of diamond, you’ve been obsessed:
A whole carbon-pressed world. A planet that can
cut glass, conduct heat and crystalline sound.
Our estimated value: $26.9 nonillion, according
to your forbes.
Our eyes are the jeweler's glasses
of god. We read meaning into the smallest irregularities,
in interior gleam. Walking in fullight is something
we’re taught to avoid, emerging only when the sun star
fades from the polished facetlands and rocky
commerce starts humming.
You can't
possibly leave it alone, now that you know
what we’re made of. All you could want, more
than you ever dreamed of. You imagine tunneling
in, scraping out glittering geological excrement.
You’ll find it isn’t the light that damages but what you
see: the insights. So bright everything else is invisible.
There are consequences
to love.
You believe anything can be possessed
with the right instruments: attitude, luck, longing,
all compressed until hard as diamond, which
means “proper,” “unalterable,” “unbreakable,”
but also “I overpower,” “I tame.” It isn’t brilliance
that burns in you. It isn’t light
that guides you.
Laura-Gray Street is the author of Pigment and Fume and Shift Work, and co-editor of The Ecopoetry Anthology and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. She is an associate professor of English; directs the Visiting Writers Series; and edits Revolute, the MFA’s literary journal, at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA.