From “Dissolve”

Sherwin Bitsui

On limbs of slanted light

painted with my mind’s skin color,

I step upon black braids,

oil-drenched, worming

from last month’s orphaned mouth.

Winged with burning —

I ferry them

                from my filmed eyes, wheezing.

Scalp blood in my footprints —

my buckskin pouch filling

                with photographed sand.

No language but its rind

                crackling in the past tense.

•

Tearing apart cloud names —

pierced fog commands:

douse the inferno’s ribs

with opaque forgetting;

clip dawn from the book’s dusk,

unfasten the song’s empty auditorium

                over a garden of mute foals.

Tearing apart fog names —

pierced cloud sings:

let them shriek from their hinges,

let them slice their gills open

with flint knives

and circle their ghosts

as frog-skinned antelope,

let them drag their legs over a trail

anchored to a ladder

that has soaked up blood

since land began crawling out of anthills.

•

Slipping into free fall,

we drip-pattern: the somewhere parts,

our shoulders dissolving

                                                in somewhere mud.

The arcing sun whistles

across the mask’s abalone brow,

its blurring pouts into a forest

chirping from a lake’s bite marks

stamped vertically on this map’s windowsill.

Kneeling our thoughts on ellipses

evaporating from ollas of fragrant wet clay —

we saddle the drowning’s slippery rim.