PRODIGAL FIELDS

 William Cordeiro

    The winds are tipsy.

    Light ebbs.

          My mouth gropes blind.

A maze of devils swims the rafters. Your dream

self holds me in its arms. Your lips repeat

a pidgin learned from sucking pebbles,

sipping ichor leached from sleep.

All night, huddled, beaming, tossing in our indecision,

all night our eyelids kiss the darkness back. The orchids tease the pollinators.

No miracle repeats. Nettle vines creep up my throat. A bell is struck. Each leaf of laurel

curls inward like a fetus. A garden efflorescent with the sewage of us: gallstones, baby’s teeth.

From a far-out spit,

the hourglass despairs. Myriads of pyramids float off as dust-motes, gold dust,

fool’s gold. I’ve watched the world

defeat us. All the things I want

must go without saying;

so saying,

I bite my tongue.          I bite my tongue and offer it to you.

Late spring, and the tadpoles pucker and splutter,

buckled nubs and permeable skin: puddling along,

they fork and rend,

                       walking over water.

I am fast before the star-crossed cross-roads where I was born,

and summer holds a secret I’ll never know the secret of. No,

no miracle repeats. We’re forever healing;

we’re picking over—we’re licking at our scabs. We stutter and mend,        

numb from leaking; numb from holding back the fountain

the blood within this body is.    

Hand in hand, the saunter of the clocks…

In spiderwebs, a beetle’s mummied.

Your rummaged lint gummies in your pocket.

A tiny padlock

clicks.

  Its combination catches

in the throat. The heart goes soft

as strands of kelp. The yielding wrack

disintegrates. Every shell we listened to

has splintered. Aloft, the charcoal clouds hold still,

hold out, betray their promise. Their patchwork slackens.

The windblown fields

are littered with scratchy weeds and scat.

Hand in hand, the clocks still saunter on…

Fetor of methane oozes over marsh-ground,

a rootlike structure

underneath us spreading,

land haunted by the minerals looted from it.

The weather ruptures where I hold you, dear.

My father’s eyes are blue as evening

when daylight orphans dawn across these hills.

My eyes are gray as catkins

when mornings wash the stars of every tear.

Will Cordeiro has work published or forthcoming in AGNI, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Frontier Poetry, The Offing, Poetry Northwest, The Threepenny Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Will’s collection Trap Street won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. Will co-edits Eggtooth Editions and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.