the last night of a wake
convection
spacesky marbled by a thousand drifting stars
a primacy of seaweed
nails painted a soft green,
like the underside of a
Caribbean wave
links on a chain
drums on the vine
the scarab,
the sun,
the catharsis of the catheter
a whole quarter of the sky
—delicate shapes of tiny fingers,
and suddenly there’s a word in your spine—
the geography of perdition:
forms and fissures
a marriage of conformities
the dark hood of the future
slipped about the face
many swells of ivory,
the feted
whale-horn:
I am not one thing, but many,
and death, you are my enemy
afterward,
she shaved all her hair to show off the blue veins on her skull
the sign of the sun
he speaks of a stone engraved with the sign of the sun,
and he speaks now to the trees, to the bricks, to the white plaster walls, to his twin in the sky who answers back from the wrong side, to the renegade chariot caught fast in a cane field,
to the world-descending angel,
still stupefied,
to the black corpse of the poem,
to the infernos of the Argentines,
to the widows in their house of yellow clay
who dare not even mouth the word,
to a grey field spreading vastly under a sky without any stars at all, to inconstant figures with inconsistent names, to a room that smells so strongly of women, to lemon trees and to tigers, to those people uptown, to ancient armies wandering in the mists of summer, to the slaves who sheafed their skins from salt in the shadows of the smokestacks, to the mothers and the machines, to this long-limbed lady with a house stuck in her chest,
to his own shadow moving matched in the mirror,
to a fire more brittle than the dayrise, standing all alone in the maze at the roots of the city.
projective geometry
Here is the knotty truth, as hard as enamel or harder yet: you are not a closed system. Up your panting nose and through the fertile membranes between the air and the brain, down your mirrored throat chasing after your crushed thirst past the rubbery tissues lining the gullet and the gut, in through the wide spaces around your eyes and down the black tunnels of your ears—or even up through the pearly back gate—comes the world, invisible save at the joints under the riverbed where everything meets.
We have come many miles for a year like this, and the mere stink of it—the power of it—swallows us: this winter like a drum, this summer vaster than empire; this world of ours, feverish and weightless on her air, wrapped now in sharps down to her hair, following the clear line of a truth like a knife hurled through dreams,
armed only with the desiccated thighbone of her father,
sloughing serpents from her skirt as she comes.
Birds alive in the pits of her.
A gust of golden wind, sour with spoilage. Bent in half like monks in the storm,
palm trees underneath which I have died before. And the black blood of her
scabbed on this latter side of the sea:
the nerves of the foliage, trembling, halting,
pelted suddenly by the starry geography
of their own sun-swallowed faces.
We have come many miles for a year like this, and for a dream in our jaw as tall as the twentieth century: her body, which is so very long.
And a vision that pulls now as tenuous and close as the skin or the sea:
the whole sternum of the earth split open
gaping and exposed, and all things within
raw like a tooth to the new sun.
I bubble in your blood and you bubble in hers,
and we break together upon the rock.
This is what is in your flesh, and mine,
and we have come many miles for a year like this.
Kenan Wilson Phillip is a Dominican-born poet living along the Texas-Mexico border, where he is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Kenan is the author of The Ego Rhythm (Flowersong Press, forthcoming), his inaugural poetry collection. He is currently working on a creative thesis exploring intercultural and Afro-Caribbean/Latino poetics, decolonialism, and the poetics of relation. Currently, he serves as volunteer coordinator and board member of the Unfolded Poetry Project, a poetry-centered nonprofit based in the Rio Grande Valley.