The Twenty-Six Years War
Where is the land beyond landscape?
Slipping across the border—
distant herds of snow.
Leaving the map behind, with its
diagrammed cities, four-square
musics, and all that predictable violence,
here clouds become ideas, as black
as headlines, and even less discreet.
I am learning a language
of otters and elk,
of distances
and profound insecurities.
Why do we kid ourselves?
Where teeth rot and stars fail, even sex
is a perpetual war with the dying.
Here the stone
seashell is my mother, I do not deny
it, here I am open, alone
advancing into the sky.
—John Morgan
—found in The Bone-Duster (1980)