Living Matter

“Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter” – Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

I keep staring in the mirror and pulling down, watching each eclipse below my eye spread across my cheek because I saw a horror movie last week where a girl was skinned alive and now I need to see the below of something. 

I open the window so I can fall in and the day can see me and be reminded that there are people who live like this. A distance so good that the shadows of geese look like hawks, tucking their heads into their chests to sleep. A quiet colony of children leaving me to the whims of instinct.

I want to know what philosophy my veins follow. From where I sit in my canopy I see only carpenter ants – thousands of parasitic jesuses breeding and leaving behind the potent dregs of their bodies. I would accept the compliment of “exhaustive disgrace” but there are small trees that line my jaws and they say differently. And what do I do if not wait for the sound of their ache in the cold? Their barky muscles swaying in confined space, encased passion. 

In my dreams I lay in garden beds in the dead of winter and I curve along the frozen mounds. It is sweet but the bitter taste of flesh follows like an apostle. Like cider lapped up from someone’s hands, like receiving communion.

The water moving under the ice like steady breath fills the gaps of a staggering, fractaling crack. It wavers for a moment of hesitation then yields, pulling away to return under the translucent sky. It seems to apologize before beginning again, like living matter.