To Memorize the Continuous Lines of Your Bones [An American Lullaby]
After “Crush” and a line from “Pachinko”
Every evening, history ruins you.
Every fallen leaf is your self-portrait where promises are made
on yellow suicide notes, petal-soft when palmed, but we’re left with our hands
scattered between blurred centuries. Every evening is another chance
to be gorgeous. To be human. But is it enough to be beautiful & never once
ask for forgiveness? What am I even saying? I’m saying
God forgets you & every lover you leave behind. This is the story we were
given & so we make a maze out of each museum we pass by
& enter the gallery of our bones. This is the painting we step out of. The walls
we bury ourselves behind, hand-shoveling ourselves in
until we taste the kissable dirt of a nation that has no choice
but to nation us. The horses in our hometowns gallop headlong
into the backyards of crushed apples. The cities we built along the inner walls
of our skin were never there—& here we are
planning the end of our lives. The aspen tree making a forest
of its shade. Our Father Who Art in Heaven tossing bodies donning your face into my
dreams like bundled newspapers landing in morning mailboxes. Remains Found in an Unplugged
Freezer by Two Homeless Men is when they all refuse
to witness human shadows & panic that countrywide American panic. Here we are
again at the gates of someone’s kingdom. You are a classified
homicide but they will call your body urgent & emerging. The wind also rises
to make the story interesting. To make His call to serve
ever more divine. Remember how the morning will arrive. Just like every evening & those
beautiful, lord-
laid leaves in the yard. Our memory rewinds the sky to see that rare, mid-autumn snow
reappear in the dark & lift back to the want left amid the stars. This is what happens
to the boy who appears in your dream—like the shepherd,
lamb-like, he is back home with a shining black barrel in his mouth
as if to carve the name
of this country to the back of his throat. At last,
give him the title he earned: ’ácqa, or him’pe’ewyíin just to say he will survive
this episode unraveling into history repeats itself, so lie back down in the field
broken by the names you forget over & over while the ghosts lift through you
& leave behind the trace of a snow angel lying facedown in its casket of night. Every evening
is this: the everlasting image of Him that you tear apart into confetti. Here
are your rights: your body with its limbs crossed out. Here are
all the usual & accustomed places that claim you can return to lullaby our ghosts farewell
but fail to say who they are. Their glottals & uvular plosives that change táxc, táqc
from táxs & t’áx. They will tell you a country isn’t a country until
it's written in a language only the living can pronounce. Handless prayers. Deliver me
from the touch of a territory I have no real name for
but hawáawa because every story I want to tell
begins & ends with blood & us reaching for each other. They will say
everything you are meant to
understand. That your bones, our bones, His bones, glitter brightest
in the earliest seconds of daybreak. Rain. Here it is again—forgive me. The rain
of their Father Almighty, hear it speaking through
flesh & pinning you against the land. The bombs are
bursting in air this evening. Look how lovely this all is. History
ruins your jaw for the next star-spangled life with a contract
& enough ink for a single signature. Here’s your family in the register—all newer names
with newer terrors that leave them fleeing through the polished windows
of America. You open the last window wide enough
to let me through. In one dream, I am making dinner for you—your favorite:
stew & bread, but is joy enough to help us survive another night
like tonight? Another dream,
I’m talking to you like you
are really here. In your boyish, still-breathing voice. Your hand reaching up & out
of my throat as if
you climbed my ribs to escape drowning inside me. Last night,
we opened our eyes together, face-to-face, & saw only deer
leaping out of sight. Your footsteps smaller with each
passing season. The world crosses us
out. Tomorrow, I will find you trapped underwater. I open my eyes &
I am right before you & we breathe like uncaught fish. But I wake
& wake & wake & that decade is already a bedroom clock behind me because
this evening is always today. The monster claims you—you swallow a god-
awful century of light & we are in slow-
motion again in that October panorama—running to you
with all your life, in chokecherry red,
bone-white, & that beautiful unbreakable blue, ’ilcwéew’cix a shard blossoming in the dark
of your skull like language measuring the worth of our
lives—like your final Fourth of July. I’m as human as you made me
to be. Tonight, don’t I look as beautiful as you do
when dressed in every skinned animal gone missing
to translation? I lie down in bed to mimic you, dead & almost forever. tóota’, don’t I look
just gorgeous enough to devour?