Startling, the morning and startling, the noon.
Mist, and we didn’t understand it.
There was a message coming from unimaginable mountains
and we breathed dumbly inside it.
Some of us had our ears to the angels,
to the windows in the basins of whiskey glasses;
measured ourselves against different sticks
and stretched our shadows.
There was never a way to medicate
the loons of the inner heart, or stop
the white scarves of our breath in winter
from howling about us. We cracked
perfect white eggs for breakfast,
glimpsed the lining of the darker
jokes, and felt very wise
and frightened. The word ‘brave’
grew a ring around it. Spilt coffee
widened on the tablecloth; it mattered
separately from other things, like the way
hearts hung inside question
marks, and the rising water, the outline
of an ark; that it was our turn to board it.
We could not sense death.
But a thicket of nights gathered in the muck
that lovingly blackens the base of the skull
and we thought of beautiful things.
by Mara Jebsen