Branches
Alice Jones
The blue buzz grew its own pulse, a light behind
closed lids, branches, the reach of living things
for what they need—sun, air, food, brought in by veins.
It’s why we have fingers, the mouth, so small, compared
to what it longs for. Breath’s cradle lulls you through
the long-shadowed days. The guts and their gurglings,
tides that spill the insides out now and then,
the nails’ lunules, lips reciting arteries—aorta,
femoral, popliteal, dorsalis pedis, plantar arch—
the body circles itself inside the mind which holds on
as best it can. Curious: those leaps into the future, fleeting
glimpses over the shoulder—here comes your life
to surprise you. Working seven years in the mystery
of the body, now the mind; inhabiting the body,
just that, to be inside one skin, the pores are holes,
you dream of circles overlapping, arcing into far space,
the rings of Saturn, pulsars, birth clouds, all those
unnamed phenomena of the galaxy, no more weird
than the liver in its squishy architecture. Nothing
random, slick surface, blood and meat smell that is you
when you are sleeping, little cannibal of all the lives
you didn’t lead, stretch into them—tell a story
and it’s yours, keep talking, fill the branches with
words. Leaf-eating ants climb out along the bough’s
underside, sticky footed, so light they don’t fall,
power of the legs to hold anything, a mind like that
lays itself down in time’s profusion, ramifies, catches,
like a circus net, the body and everything it can.