Moon at Half Past Noon

When the world is a turtle
stranded on the arch of its back,
when north is a slick on the floor,
and the compass is cracked—
when every word spoken
is a brick in a wall,
and the heart’s plain fact
is the first fact to fall—

what’s left but the leaking?
What’s left but the sound?

I cry the blunt rain
no ocean can catch.
My throat is the split
in the wall of alright.
It draws, through the muck
of this long, inverted night,
a wire.

A live one.
Trembling. Terminal-bare.
To what?
Not a shore.
Maybe the wish of air
in the pause of a breath
before the caught sob—
a contour of was
that the spinning un-spools.

This isn’t grace.
This is the animal pound
in the chest of a thing
the world stood on its ground
and told to walk.
Let rage be the root.
Let grief be the stone
worn smooth in the pocket,
known, and known, and known.

But even a turtle—
with nothing but ache
and the tilt of its unbalanced weight—
can find a slight jut,
a crack in the slate,
and push.

The sea in the ribs
isn’t just for the breaking.
It’s the lift and the slide.
The raw, slow unmaking
of down.
Then the patient, wet braille
of the new, true ground
read by shell.

To right the tipped self
in the absolute dark
takes a lifetime of thrust.
No promise. No arc.
Just the work.

Till the sky might, again,
be a thing we call sky.
And the dirt might recall,
in its particles, why
it should hold, and not lie.
And we, in our turn,
after such tilting, may learn
how to stand—not as chosen,
but as something that yearns,
and has turned.