Greg Scott Brown
Lazarus Laments


Who knew raising the dead
would be such work?

So dry everywhere
so sucked dry, so

pushed to the edge of meaning,
so collared into the husks

of their skins, from which we judge our own.

They straddle a gutter of stars
redundant, alone.

I have no way to carry them.
They are precisely more

or less this weight
this bag of stones

that pulls beneath the surface—
one great, bright, everlasting gasp

between birth and the hour unknown.

image

"Pearl," Merlin Flower