POINT OF ENTRY    /    Katherine DiBella Seluja

  

 

This is the kind of night where one must pay one’s debts

 

The secret: never ask the body to give up its truths alone.

 

I see dancing skeletons, I mark the desert with crosses.

 

Won’t you say to me the word that conquers death?

Silence: speak.

 

Sometimes she whispers to the bones 

rarely, they whisper back

 

At the edge of sleep, some slim truth or partial answer 

to her list of many questions

 

This isn’t what she had trained for, 

not what she had imagined.

 

 

(I have learned the ways 

of dirt and stone 

 

how best to backfill 

the hole 

 

how gently 

to settle the box.)

 

 

The wind is a thin child’s call

 

My shadow is a cat arching and whining.

 

Each small heaven is full of risk.

 

I live curled in the mouth of the fox

 

His flesh was breathing slower than a wall

 

Who do you think was speaking 

when you heard, Beware the ditch?

 

There are miles enough for everyone, down to the smallest child walking shoeless in the desert, trying so hard to avoid the thorns.

 

We dead have so much more than worry.

 

The dead do not rest.

They wait.

 

By the time he reached the gangplank, his stomach was an old woman jumping in her shoes.

 

They knew it was useless and 

that seemed to make it more compelling.

 

What soup can resist the flavor of weary?

 

 

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