Debrah Morkun

I.

Lichen-bearers root themselves
like midnight, vast
orion-body, turncoat:




O father, senseless, who lives by the lake,
says in twenty-five years this vast
water-body will disappear:





II.

i could tell
the city
from a graveyard,

i couldn’t tell
the city from the tall
ladder in your room:

you climbed it yesterday

you climbed it just once
and you felt girlish





III.

Tritocosmos. Last year, the geriatric months assembled in beds, sleeping. The days fell from girl to mouth. The years broken like Saint Marie standing in earth pond. I told you, in the decades to come, we’d hold our hands open to feel the moist sweat of the turn-coat landscape as it spoils the way we hear voices at night, those decades lying,
these centuries lying about stories
of boys who jumped onto trains
to make it to Mexico in time

to make it to Guadalajara in time
to catch the next viewing of the saint child
resting in the amber room of the saint hospital
where they stole the Lenten mass last year
and gave it half alive to the pope farmer
whose rake glistens in the half-cratered sun




IV.

He made each girl a runner

He made each girl
a soft-green
mermaid

he made each girl freeze,
behemoth, each girl
frozen and delighted





V.

she is sky-blue and so forgets to recollect her leg in the surf

she weeps over the death
of the old man
who held a grey
tiara in his hands
before passing

he held a silver
crown in his hands
and then he closed
his eyes

Posted 08/01/09