When we had walked the earth on stones and heels my mother’s sister whose leatherbeaten hands upheld our intestines used to say that the shores were the figments of storyshells strewn across the backs before speaking.
We sleep jarred from this night where it is as stark. We were once wine amongst our men, a time when history was something. Do you remember, do you remember the feel of grasstems beneath your feet wet, the wind like leaves to greet you? On your grave the tombstone in you like this flat rock that time fell and crumbled against.
Has he kissed you then? Has he held your mouth open to the taste of what is crackling in the back of our throats? Did it burn to have his tongue roll with the sea and sand of our apocatástasis?
Did the body ever leave you as it did us? Did the ache, the arché of your skull twist left of what we had brought ourselves to? Did you hear the strain, could you hear how our knees propped up our chins and we could not form thoughts in our mouths?
Had you held yourself for once against this night, this night where we hear the tearing of jaws against our gums, where we scream for the names that have left us, this night where the shore never leaves the hearing of your never coming, where we placed our rosy knucklefists to spit the shells out of our mouths, this night where you were seen heavy jowlskin dancing in cigarette smoke, dangling our ears in your belt, had we seen you too at least held against this night drowning of all our voices, of all the sound that is not howling but the something of which we will never forget the splitting of nothing at all.
Whisper to us of that night when our beast was strong and it bespoke of generations, of what was torn, of what was rendered. Of our jaws made right edges with our necklines, of leatherdust and of the sun aching to be at our feet.
Speak to us of these days after night where we scramble in fields of broken cornspines, bent double over backwards, our hands as white as corpses, as white as words.
There was a pebble on the shore that a mother had bent to keep away from the tiny footfingers of her child by placing it in her mouth, her teeth ragged. The mother straightened her back, in years.