halfcactus

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.

Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.

Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels

so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out

the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue

recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn

some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,

Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full

of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward

what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.

We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,

if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big

people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

I want to give you something, or I want to take
something from you. But I want to feel the exchange,
the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out
and the ear holding on to it.

—from HOW FAR AWAY WE ARE

And I never knew survival
was like that. If you live,
you look back and beg
for it again, the hazardous
bliss before you know
what you would miss.

—from BEFORE

The hens do not love him. Neither do the oranges.

But they survive together: fuel for the future:

A picture of a feather without the bird,
A picture of an orange without the tree,
A picture of a shadow without a boy.

—from A TRICK OF THE LIGHT

When he drove me to school, we decided
it would be a good day if we saw the blue heron
in the algae-covered pond next to the road,
so that if we didn’t see it, I’d be upset. Then,
he began to lie. To tell me he’d seen it when
he hadn’t, or to suppose that it had just
taken off when we rounded the corner in
the gray car that somehow still ran, and I
would lie, too, for him. I’d say I saw it.
Heard the whoosh of wings over us.
That’s the real truth. What we told each other
to help us through the day: the great blue heron
was there, even when the pond dried up,
or froze over; it was there because it had to be.

—from THE GREAT BLUE HERON OF DUNBAR ROAD

Sometimes, you just want
something so hard you have to lie about it,
so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,
how real hunger has a real taste.

—from LIES ABOUT SEA CREATURES

Isn’t it funny? How the cold numbs everything but grief.
If we could light up the room with pain,
we’d be such a glorious fire.

Clock: turn back, turn back—
everything you’ve dialed to black.

What was it I wanted?
The captain to sail safely? To land alive and, like survival, loved?

—LASHED TO THE HELM, ALL STIFF AND STARK

Entries tagged with ada limon

Ada Limón, "Dead Stars"

ada limón | bright dead things

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