John Sibley Williams
Story That Begins and Ends with Burning
Dust rises from the road & there is
too much curve to resolve the edges
of embankment & asphalt. Backfire
keeps the pastureland carefully lit.
Static keeps us wanting for another
kind of song. In the long afterward,
we’ll have time to distinguish death
from the other things buried away in
the back of the closet unopened all
these years. Barbed almosts. Tender
distractions. The language of here
lost in memory’s worship & wispy
white clouds we assumed composed
tomorrow. The suddenness of crash
brings us back to ourselves. Fierce
rearrangement of metal and skin. I
move through the damage like any-
thing that’s finally learned to divide
brokenness from healing. We’re no-
where special; two miles from home
& counting the distance a body can
travel once free of the vehicle that
carries it. Kicked-up ash; a burning
in the distance; our edges blurred;
flowers laid; the road no straighter.
How Skin Comes to Resemble a Map,
All our conquered countries resettle
now. In the flaccid stretch between
thigh and ocean, what held together
by youth alone comes undone. Yes,
we used to believe in things, eternal
things. When we touched ourselves
the earth shook. When we learned
to touch each other, heaven split
open into gin blossom and bruise.
Now impotence, ire. These creases
we think lead back to mother and
father in fact bleed further back than
any deer skin map stretched over an
incomplete earth. To negate the land
we have a thousand different balms.
When we’re able to sleep, we sleep
with cold plastic masking our eyes
and a machine to drown out night.
A body once worked what it loved.
What a body loved would conquer it
eventually. What I love is not being
sorry for rejecting my country, that
this aging horse came with the field,
and no one knows how to break it.