The End of the Alphabet

by Claudia Rankine

  like someone knocking at the temple—arriving

  within each soul growing old

  begging, impatient

  for these nights to end, wanting

  never darkness—

  its murmurous mirror:

  *

  its drained tongue

  as dead driftwood soaking the vein

  as these words float up

  out of body

  in a joke sharpened in or sharpening

  each myopic minute

  met

  and now dirtied up, or far too beautiful

  for this

  and now desperate for

  the never would or could

  or at least had not meant to mean). Pity the stirred.

  So stormed out, as in exhausted, my eardrums left watching.

  Each nerve, in the mood exhumed,

  hissing, go away,

  go away, night sky, did we come this far together?

  I am cold. And in this next breath,

  the same waking,

  the same hauling of debris. I am

  here in the skin of … otherwise) shoveling out, dryly