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Elizabeth Howkins

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The Sacrifice

Painted bright by fever, your life
interrupted and like a deer dressed
and hung limp on a cold iron fence
to drain, suspended over that great
empty space where hard dice are cast
from long cool fingers, you tug out
each breath like a little root,
each inhalation suddenly gone stiff
like the pins in a geisha’s hair.

Your face is pale as fine Irish linen.
On each temple, your veins scrawl a thin
blue blossom as your blood flames sharp
like a trumpet vine and pours out a cold
tin star in your side.

That night I dream of rivers stained garnet
and of water birds rusty in their wings,
in that hammock of space between the sky
and the earth, that still empty canvas
yearning for color, which you fill slowly
with your bright alizarins, your crimsons
stark as peonies pouring form an overturned bowl.

As I turn the last pages of my book and whisk
the air with shadows, you slip beneath your sheets,
a white moth erased behind a rice paper fan.
The weight of your breath shifts heavily
from one dark side to another as you swim upwards
toward the light like a noon fish, like a diver
surfacing and shaking off the darkness slowly
like burnt crumbs.

 

Page(s) 144

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