Cynthia Cruz

Trace 

I am memorizing The Seventeen Volumes of Sorrow, again.

I am coating my face

in the clear wet emollient

of the past.

Here, where I am

the taper candles

never go out.

I cover my body

in its invisible light.

And the dead

enter the way

music enters

the minds of the sick.

Lenz, making his way

up into the terrible mountain

his mind blind with sadness.

Escape was impossible.

And everyone I knew then

is gone now, dead, or in prison.

Their names, like glass jars

lined along the corridors.

The murmuring

ceremonies of memory.

I touch the wound

and I begin

to speak.

Pharmakon

Where is the body

of my mother?

A child in cream

ballet leotard and thick

cotton tights. In the backyard

of the steel factory town,

in white wings

beneath the yellowing

sick yellowing of morning.

Her body

is there, still

—in Völkingen,

glittering

with all the other

un-Dead.

And I am

walking into that

glittering burning—

Conjurer

The milky horse pulls through

the white death

of morning

its wooden carriage

a whirr of silence

a blanket of glimmering

snow.

We have stayed awake

every night until dawn

awaiting the arrival

of the gelatinous

and darkening

garden.

Now is the hour

most people will die.

The hour when

children are born.

It is the hour when memory

returns: dim film,

dumb dream: a second

amnesiac birth.

Now is the hour

the delicate veils

of the mind

are finally

and irrevocably

broken.