Stuck in my brain’s electrical
gelatin, under the weight of what
I’ve carried all these years, I remember
an oak scratching not far from the window
of a lingering thought:
the branches pirouette like a marionette
who can’t stop dancing a ballet
it knows by heart, maybe
a diva has memorized
her aria, the opera is about selling
blunders and loss. Once, I had a friend
who died
having an affair—a lover
shot himself in the chest—three times.
It could have been an overdose, of alcohol or meth,
it could have been a car crash,
a million wrong turns.
The opus of a short life ending
in the calm of a lover’s arms.
There—stuck in my neural net
the drama has no answers for how
turritopsis dohrnii can live forever, or why
a fleeting glimpse of us remains
on a breezy afternoon as if we had been
those lovers sauntering alone
on Okunoshima, the island east of Hiroshima,
the one that holds a history of war
crimes and mustard gas,
lucky
to have its beach unscathed
by bleeding blindness,
lucky to be alive
strolling among the throngs
of large-eared rabbits who hop in front of us
lively as Ebizo Xi dancing
the paths of hanamachi.
Photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash
