Corrina, how much must I remind myself you are unpossessed,
a sack of bones,
a satchel of organs,
and weave
affixed by natural root
surcutaneously.
You are a beehive of mitochondria—
future wind-drift: to-be-blown ash,
or, soon-to-be submergent: soil-interment: :
or, if lost while spelunking, what draft of air
would lead anyone to your last remains,
through interconnected grottoes niched
with primordial Lares and Penates,
in a stalactite-roofed camber resonating with the perpetual
drip of water?
And I a prospective cell-regenerator—
receive my amorations, my x and y,
this flex which perches like a rabbit
haunched taut before it dives
into a warren swelling
in number throughout the months.
Despite any regressivity in my attitude or method,
accept the offered moieties of my stance.
My limbs would reslope at your unspoken bidding,
slide shutters of shadow deferential and protective
over the Earth when we walk in sunlit ways.
When I follow you into the elevator,
Corrina,
I am aware of the feldspar and fire-
embers of amethyst
embedded in your skin
and vital caverns.
There were times when it was a ghost town
amid your hips,
or aslant your xiphoid.
I was restless with the unsaid unporched within my ears,
Agreeabilities unfusable, misgivings incongruous,
your feelings and stories would not separate
into their respective boxes of cognizance;
instead, made a calico-pied mottlework of confusion:
a juggernaut of conveyored ideo-perceptive juggernotions.
The spaghetti-wired switchboard of my head
(old fashioned perhaps in a zeitgeist of silicon circuitry)
connects factory-sized machinery.
When we are at odds, the factory
is haunted by ghosts,
gold-visible
in autumn-vesperous light—
Your totality outshines both the visible and the invisible.
You are not my aleph, nor premonition of mortality…
yet you can dissipate with the turn
of a heel.
August Smith has been travelling the country for the past two years, but in these pandemic times is circumscribing his perambulations within Alpine, TX, where he writes and photographs. His poems have appeared, among other places, in Wide Open and The Great American Poetry Anthology (1988).
Nevermore Journal 