Member Poem

I. Delilah
 
Do you remember, nine years ago 
when you pulled me
                        under
 for an entire night to spend all of my days,
 hanging like a loose leaf cape, until I could no longer
sway to the whisperings of your
children, growing like a mold,
and chatting around me, like
 ducks;
when their mouths returned to us,
wide, cruel, clinging, and adorned with
 seductions,
you said, ‘let go’
 ‘let them eat
our frost bitten wings.’
 
 I split.
 
            And
do you remember
how we talked?  Those endless days
we made;
dying by queer atoms, sun-bearing and skin worshipping
with you, gazing upon my black gothic smile like you could
actually kiss it.
 
I remember,
                                                                                
from your chest - your scribbling’s hammered into me
until the grains of my scalp
finally rippled  down
 from bare, merciless light
 to meet a place, further on;  a cave marked
Delilah.
nearing; I found small flowers, parent buds,
the silk blends, like a tea, perfectly made to snap a bee;
 
So I thought,
as the diagnosis read “cut”   -  I -  I could see.
 
you     always ask,
 
‘how far would you go, who would you leave,’
 even deeply in love, ‘what blithe
keeps true to this heaven
 of strangeness’–
 
to see my face beyond earthly help, in dead faint, a cave,
a gape of bandages, shapeless beneath
 desultory dressings
passing, in fizziness, the anticipatory tremors,
 and joy, dabbing my eyes from the shapeless hole,
my mouth,
hissing and beeping; it’s so hot, so hard
 to draw breath,
           
until the only thing I see that confirms,
Delilah,
that tells me this is you,
Delilah,
is the flood, the golden springs of hair, locked and
twinned         wide and loose, hanging out
with my hands, holding you, from the ugly,
loosened sweat, strangled from a limb,
like a loose leaf cape.