Sometimes

Sometimes Something

I

I have a thought that comes to me like this:

even after all the lavished years,

the laugh that set his vanished youth afire,

the smell of smoke as my kiss climbed his neck.

He rose up from the margin of the night,

rock-and-roll thin, wrapped in leather, liner—

as though the dark had fashioned him a face.

He looked like death.

In a city built for the dead, he brought me

something I still can't say is life —

only that it moved, and seemed itself alive,

and I believed it was the light of morning

until I’d seen it was only ever the moon, borrowing.

II

Sometimes something wakes that ache in me,

that old anticipation without cause—

but now it fastens itself to nothing human.

It comes when evening gathers in the trees,

when something nameless moves beneath the sea,

and I think of a city built for the dead

and long for it.

I dream about the trees, even as they die,

and long to meet the sea inside its storms.

I dream of deer whose silence watches back,

of owls turning darkness into sound,

of fish beneath the undecipherable blue.

I think perhaps they are not unlike us,

or we were once more nearly kin to them;

that somewhere underneath the human tongue

their older tongue still talks in me,

and learning it enough could make me stay.

And then I feel the rain's mouth on my skin,

then the wind move like a hand between my limbs,

and for a moment I forget the bombs,

and the world's hunger, its mouth turned on itself.

And then I know what I have always loved:

the natural world, indifferent and immense;

the sea not needing to know my depths,

the trees seasonally meeting with death,

the creatures innocent of our despair.

And night, whose face I recognize the most—

wearing the shadow that the moon has stitched

across its brow, as if the dark itself

were something sacred enough to be adorned,

while somewhere underneath its ancient grace

the world turns, innocent of my existence.

Marni Fraser

0810.2026

VIII:XII PM

Image 2026