Weight

1.
Even now it's a long sickness,
deep swamps, the filling
of empty space with mud.

Day after day, this. The body's
welling gravity.


2.
How strange to dig
fingers into the sand and feel
the ocean's rough pulse.
Into the flesh as well,
the ocean there.

Little more than the buzz of nerves.
I know this. I know this. It seems
too much to know.


1b.
Nothing eases it. You can't say
here is the end, here
the beginning, touch it. Pull it to you.

Listen, it sounds
like a hurt animal.

You can only bend at the waist,
choke.
Feel the heavy cringe
in each cell.


2b.
My heart wants to
be shot of itself but

simple things upset me

so instead I go where the earth
runs thin and gasping and
cleave to it.

Cleave,
then forsake.


3.
So it is that I compress, fold inward,
densify. The millstone
around my neck is

the way the body is not
a burden or a freedom but
the only thing we know.