Gramarye

by Gregory Leadbetter 

 
I want speech that makes my skin
more than the book I have made
of its membrane
     silent as lips
     at the mouth
that leans from the air

     and this is how
that work in my flesh began:
the desire that drew me like sap
to its tip, where I hung by my voice
     from the whispering ash
     that grew in the garden
     it made of my death
for runes cut by the tongue to touch
every beginning that is to come
to the egg from which I was born.

I learned to know love by the names that I made
and the names took bodies of their own
that glistered with the dust of their home:
unblinking at the strangeness of what I had done
in piercing their silence, sending my voice
to open as an iris under their sun:
they pluck it from the pulsing earth and come.

I have woken to moonlight leaking from the wound:
     the skin that I speak with
     fresh with the blood of its wish.

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