Christine Hume

 

 

 

Noctilucent Elegy

 

Walking transmits the dangers of waiting
When you taste its air you can't return
You pass radio music muffled in a parked car
Wind does not stop burning down your night
It's a red noise like memory
Of wings circling the cliff
You pass a bandaged man with a sticky beard
This is not the face
You pass a couple burying themselves in sand
Your name called out
Won't make you look
Winds don't have names like oceans do
Slurring and drinking you double-ended
Drinking you over-present
Until your skin is itself a moon
Set against the black lapping
As magnetized as mute
Your heart tick microphones
In every faceless thing
The wind moves around
Wind in the half-face of some future face
Grotto-boned boulder-sob
If you hear night
And it tells you it isn't
Falling then will you believe?

 

 

 

 

Ward

 

We amputated you as you slept
and you had no more nights.
We wanted to lick you with our black tongues
but you were packed in meat
and leaking milk. You were long gone
and looking exactly like you in our mirror.
Mirrors at every corner
made sure you startled yourself
enough to stay shattered. We wondered
at the owls crowding out your words,
a wolf loping out of a bloody word
out of a fog horn and lowing train,
a wolf creeping out of your eyes.
Above you a helicopter you pelt
with those red stones. Your sky
had other eyes that hammered
their headless wrath into your head.
Your sky was feathered with hesitations.
How long would you stay lashed
to your half-ash, half-lake mattress?
To boxy shadows we unloaded
into your room just trying to weather it.
We pretended you could not hear in the dark
but you took word each all the way in.
We tried to shake what was ours
out of you but it broke on your lips.

 

 

 

 

Her Night Lamb
            It and Other

 

some rustic understood / darkness passing by

in that body / his metaphor / opened

the mistake— / dream ancestors

muttering as if they / suffer / to witch to pieces

my childhood / that pleasure / of infinite

objection / objection / infidelity to doubt

crushed err / objection ob- / jection

I staggered / along long coasts / I was not

—I was / in these mazes
 
night endured /without my face 

on an unwholesome / red headless pillow  

unfit fingers / locked me / out of my head

reveries murder / the brain—

the body / devils him— / like one head

behind / the shadow-existence

even rural / my dreaming / thought I was

gone: / icy songs / of a river fiddle.

After that / the leading god /greeted me

with a white rough / river motion

that waft / her foot Lamb / to my idle 

side / to my eluding / auspicious inland.