Carlin Pierce

​

He was the first to die,

as he set off in the bowl 

of melting icebergs

fins of fish offering him floating

stones to miracle step

over salt-stained centuries. 

Carefully he cut out his heart

and offered it to the ghosts 

of birds who carry no knives—

noncombatants under no name stones—

To be human is to mark our time

upon this earth with death.

Left handed, he gave his fingers 

one by one he planted them, curled

around the bolted seed of green leaves

and daisies

on battered bones of index fingers

pointing once and finally to their 

oxygen, did their petals start to 

breath. Again. 

Into the fire he sent his hair, but

unable to part with his scalp, he left

the melting desert and sailed 

on the swells of dark plastic

smoke until he reached the far

side of the sea and started over

with old friends,

fish ghosts who offered him 

the shells of nautiluses.  

Blowing kisses to their eggs, 

he thanked them with a drowning

and upon his resurrection, he ate 

some man-made island

and two rubber ducks—

A better gift than martyrdom—

But he could not give the fish back their

fish souls, and the carbon birds

could not return from flying underwater.

He sank, for a moment

thinking of sandstone mountain lilies

of petroglyphs and a 

farmhouse buried in mountains older

than all his dying.

Unable to drink their poison for them

he walked on fish once more

air drowned this time

through the flat lands, with dancing bones

and dirt drawn lines and fences

made for skewering.

He breathed in the Mississippi mud until 

his blood became a spring delta

and he knew he could carry with him 

unflowing rivers and crack growing land

in one molar.

And he spit for the fish in the river—

they didn’t have enough water for his feet—

“Almonds,” they fish whispered, their dialect 

a song of mud heat and mosquito diets

“Our waves go west.”

And still he walked until he met the throat 

of his mountains and he laid there

inside, smoke and mud and salt and 

so many souls—

But the mountains would not take it

from him—not this time—

He’d given them too much pain to hold already 

bald and barely there.

“To marble” they murmured with a cool spring storm

to marble and to men.

To the east, he flew this time, for even though 

his hills would not suck out 

his secrets, they offered him a wing 

of other souls close to flying, close to clouds,

and when he disembarked

he thanked the ghost bird for its stories

of moons and burning stars he couldn’t 

hope to see and slopes and times of vines and crowns

when his mountains brushed the skies

now they were old, the feathers said, now 

they were wise—

“wise enough not to take your pain inside them.”

He turned and walked into a domed circle room 

and turned and out of his mouth poured

specter and black mud 

and orange smoke and dried wet salt and yellow ducks with sad eyes and fish bones and ghosts of birds with no knives and oil and water meant for almonds and there he fell and there

he died.

 

And quickly, the faces seeing death cried out with wide mouths 

where is his heart?  I need one!

Where is his finger?  I want a new one!

Clean this up it stinks in here.  

 

And they tossed the skins of dead trees

Over his body and his ghosts and his mud and his stories and the souls he had carried

so they would not smell the truth of the mountains

so ink broken marks on dead things 

would make movement feel like action.