James Byrne
Medicine
Sometimes I catch you staring into yourself –
your face a curlicue of planet-ringed distances.
How do your eyes accomplish suddenness?
Alert as poppies, and yet dissected as city pavement.
Often I have seen how your face is a stampede,
prevented by something inside your skin.
Tonight we heard a faintness of geese outside
all whinging among the leathery bracken.
You nosed at the windowpane and whispered…
Medicine.
I wonder if the pride you wear so steeply
might one day collapse into a prim of confidences.
Memory seems to have such jagged fingernails.
I now know why it scratched us into flesh.
Page(s) 25
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