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Seeing as it is
in pieces, speech
makes its mouth out.
Pinned by a limb
of indistinct stars
we run together.
Our silence forced
paper-white
roots in a bed of gravel
means more than all the ways
I wouldn’t think to say without you.
On my first day
back from the dead
I return to the world
what I took to the grave—
shame, lies, un-
remembered dreams
(my site a future forest).
With baffled clarity
of a window on night
I see myself wrong
end of periscope,
its eye there.
*
I don’t remember weather
in my dreams, only light
and ambient blackness.
As cell towers made
to look like trees,
a seed
falls to pavement
pushing back—
I dream in all the languages
but only speak the last.
*
Does day replace night
or just upstage it?
At the end of the street-
light, black
stars strain.
The difference in
silhouette and shadow
is complete (this
speech is so me)—
I have no words
to begin with.
speaks volumes
into the room
we think our minds
the furthest reach
of evolution
what’s visible is
the size of light.
Kate Colby’s seventh book of poetry, The Arrangements, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2018. She has received awards and fellowships from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, the Poetry Society of America and Rhode Island State Council for the Arts. She lives and works as a copywriter in Providence.
This originally appeared on August 4, 2017