POEM: Exit Canticle
Exit Canticle
Some direction takes me to the mouth of leaving—
on foot beneath the cauterizing heat,
or further, always further,
away and into the unknown.
And I say to my sad eyes:
you are going away now.
Then I lay my head down,
shake it loose of everything—
into the desert,
into the cities
I have conjugated like old verbs—
until finally I become them.
Vast. Scoured. Sovereign.
Not clean because I am pure—
clean because I am done.
Because I can unlatch myself.
Because your life is mortared shut.
You are a reliquary no one can open—
gorgeous, gilded, absolutely hollow.
Gems under the meridian sun,
meant to glitter from a corridor away—
never to survive proximity,
never to hold a single thing
when the light changes.
Goodbye, she sings, and her voice
goes out like a sail finding the fog’s corridor—
then into the preposterous blue,
into skies so cloudless
they become a second silence,
vast as everything
she no longer is carrying.
How ravaged a thing is a person
who has only the grammar of kindness
and none of its quickening.
A statue not merely hollowed—
but casting hollow,
poured and cooled and polished
into the shape of something
that had a soul nearby
and left only its silhouette.
Corrosion is already at work
in chambers I no longer enter.
I am not waiting for it.
I have already walked into the pellucid distance
and become indistinguishable from it—
wide,
ungoverned,
finished with grief.
II.
Fuck you—
for the architecture of your suffering,
for the intellect worn like a gorget,
for the voice kept soft as absolution
while your hands were already elsewhere.
I wish you untroubled mornings.
I wish you exactly the peace you deserve.
You are a creature of deniability—
not by accident. By appetite.
You verified me in secret,
like an inquisitor with clean hands.
You chose the voice
that had nothing at stake
over the one that stood there
with nothing left to conceal.
You came through distance—
cold, precise—
and returned
the moment the door was unlatched.
And still
you lied.
Because honesty in your mouth
would be a foreign country
with no roads in.
You were given something irreducible
and selected the counterfeit—
because the counterfeit
asked nothing of you
In the room where you are alone
with the accurate version of events,
be ashamed.
Marni Fraser
0426.2026
The Ghost 2024
