Storm Toward Morning. Malachi Black
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to MSM
I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see me more.
Henry VIII, 3.2.225–27
Contents
Title Page
1 I
10 Drifting at Midday
11 You
12 The Beekeeper’s Diary
13 Rain
14 When I Lie Down
15 Awake
16 Sleepwalker, Lost
17 Face to Face
18 Mirroring
19 Against the Glass
20 Quantum Solstice
21 As a Draft
1 II
1 Quarantine Lauds Prime Terce Sext None Vespers Compline Nocturne Vigils Matins
1 III
1 A Memo to the Self-Possessed
2 That the Bones Which Thou Hast Broken May Rejoice
3 Query on Typography
4 I Have Forgotten You, My Self
5 Our Lady of Sorrows
6 To the Executioner
7 Morning Shows
8 Dining after Dawn
9 The Winter Traveler
10 For Love of Ice
11 Plainsong
12 Whalesong
13 Found
14 Growing Season
15 Metamorphosis
16 Fragments from an Afterlife
17 The Puncture
18 Prayer for a Slow Death
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Special Thanks
I
Under an Eclipsing Moon
I am the black strokes on the baby grand
piano in whose hands I am tonight
beside the hospital, a yellow gram
of Valium with me in the bright
side of this house behind a darkened high
school baseball diamond. Here it’s too dim,
too overcast to know what sort of slim
lip the moon has grooved into the sky.
So what can I, whose veins are purpled through
with bits of broken glass and vodka,
whose heart claps like a shoe, what can I do
but play a drunken, pill-induced sonata,
watch it backflip and rebound, caterwauling
in a somersault of sound around the room?
Traveling by Train
And faster past another frozen river,
the brambles, shrubs, and underbrush of dead
woods and the garbage that was left behind
by runaways and skunks: the plastic bags
and twine, shoes beside forgotten brands
of beer whose cans, so battered