with a first line by Jim Harrison

We have to do something about the night.
It came with false expectations.
Fever. Waterlogged body. Circuitous
thought. I gave night all my sleep
and still it torments me. Still it refuses
to end. Its hunger has swallowed
the tips of my fingers. Look.
There’s a cloud of gnats beyond
my second knuckle. A buzzing swarm.
An itch that won’t be appeased.
Anything could be sprouting at the end
of my hand. A tree branch. An ossuary.
A tongue, slipping away from me.
Open-vowelled and wounded.
How do I say mama and mean it?
Memory like all falsehoods
must be put to rest. Do I have
enough bodies willing to be interred
in someone else’s present? Do I have
enough room. How do I inhabit
a wound? Any container is finite,
especially one made of flesh.
These signs I make with my right hand,
can you read them? These gestures
I make with my left, do they soothe?
I cannot soothe myself. Each
ghostly fingertip, a reminder. I am
yet to be born from a syringe. My sister’s
punctured hip. A different testament,
one no one has read. A new Eden.
I am waiting to be returned to myself
in one piece. Neither God nor Adam
are present. The rib? Far too weak
to contain me. I am about to be weighed
and I’ve already been found wanting.
The skin sloughs off, followed by flesh,
muscle, tendon and nerve, until all
I can see is the flicker of bone,
splintered in my own image, a shallow
dinghy for this torrent of marrow,
this porous reality, in which she
who is almost me      may still happen