POEM: Kali in the Roses
Kali in the Roses
There is a goddess in the roses and poppies,
the ones opening like words
that shouldn’t speak—
And whose petals drop like the last
of something not known in time?
I am not going there.
I was always there.
The ruin is always inside my walls.
I sigh and night-birds
lift from the nirvan-dark —
Oh borderless cloak. . .
You stretch across half the breathing world,
your hem a slow hemorrhage
when crimson meets its own shadow
and even then I don’t look away.
Somewhere under the crust of everything
a fist strikes the earth’s spine
and the pain rings.
—
Kali.
It was you all along —
your many arms not cruel
but thorough,
because your justice is thorough.
You gave me the divine fruit of endings
and broke it open against my neck
until I understood
that the breaking was the lesson
and the lesson had no end.
I choked on what I could not swallow.
I choked on the choking.
I choked on the fact
that I open anyway.
—
Again.
And what do I know?
This world does not end things clean.
It leaves me walking,
leaves me articulate,
leaves me capable of beauty
while my house goes dark —
room by room,
each light going out
as I watch.
The world simply
practiced on me.
—
The shadows used to be the bell —
iron tongue, deliberate,
counting you out.
Now they’re older:
a choralmoan —
voices low and frictionless,
mourning without object,
a sound that does not need anyone
to be its reason.
—
And the stars —
they do not fall so much as surrender,
spinning into their own end
the way a certain me did,
a dignified death,
quiet.
What crashes against the earth’s chest?
A hole opening in the night’s fabric
that the night does not repair
because the night
has decided
it prefers the opening.
I carry a last light in a body
that stopped making it —
a broken lantern carries this flame
it did not kindle
and will not feel warmth from,
and holds it anyway
because the road is dark
and there are others on it.
A failed attempt at martyrdom. . .
This is mechané —
the pendulum of participating,
the apparatus of continuing.
Love once passed through me
like warm weather through a valley —
it shaped the land,
then went on.
What remains
is not grief, exactly.
Something like
the memory of that temperature —
the body’s knowing
of warmth existing once,
and the burn of it in the tissue,
a scar to be read
but not felt.
—
And the world spins its works —
its magnificent indifferent works —
and dying among them,
unremarkable to anyone watching,
unheroic,
unannounced —
to anyone.
Marni Fraser
0505.2026
Photo by Marni Fraser
05.05.2026
