Inmensa luna, cielo al revés

lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it

I can tell you there is no word for this

in any language. I’ve asked

and everyone seems to confirm

its translatability.

Feet shuffling off a stone pillar-

simple, but not easy. A young tree

fracturing under the sudden weight-

exactly how one imagines it.

And somewhere between shuffle and fracture

the silence of Scott Koch’s body

falling off the Normanwood Bridge,

which is also the silence of stone

staring up from the riverbed,

where a swarm of mayflies

hatches in the predawn, coal-dark

aubade of a Susquehanna morning.

                         ~

If you were a hatch of insects

or freshman in college

and bought some pot and drove out

with friends to gaze at stars

writing their arc across the sky

you would know stars make

a hell of a racket. Like time, like death,

they scrawl inscrutable marks

of light.

                         ~

Say you are not a hatch of insects

or one of those kids wrecked and lovely,

their skins’ leaf-awkward sheen.

Though if you were, you’d be lost

in a fury of living and dying.

You’ll have to trust the words

for the way his face twitched, went

stone-white, for how unbeautiful

his body comprehended night,

for a breath not taken, for the arrested

air in his lungs.  For anything else,

you’ll need something like a life, or memory.

                         ~

I give them to you piecemeal,

hand over hand, as if in aftermath

I press each against your mouth.

They taste of salt. They fall into place.

They are beginning to mean

less and less.  They only do

what they do- cars ticking

over a bridge, wheel of a flower cart

knocking cobblestone.

Miscreants by James Hoch