by Ioanna Carlsen
Birds vocalize
even when you don’t hear them,
and then you do
and they bring you back here,
where a stone statue of a boy on a dolphin,
bereft of light, exists anyway.
Even in the dark he shines, still warm,
or in winter, cold as zero.
Even after the slivering or sharding of entropy,
even after an earthquake,
a tidal wave, Vesuvius,
there might still be parts of him
someone like yourself could glue together.
Whereas you,
you will become a space a body once fit.
Breath,
is not where staying is.
Breath, savagely arriving and leaving,
is absence incarnate,
the part of you that cannot be salvaged.
No pieces of it surface.
Breath is
nothing,
as the statue, hides what it knows—
that you come home without yourself,
somebody else will have to live for you
.(Something else sing
while the bird flies.)
