. . . . . NOT ENOUGH Load me up with stones, can you see my body twisting? All along this road there are both brave and buried bones, here, and here, and one in my dirt-filled heart. To be the General of Sorrow, the grave meanness of a walk into one’s own memory. How does one lay down her rigid plans for infinity? Like a sword in the street? Take it, do with them what you will. There is no other here, except for me, no lonely pendulum, no swing me to the middle of the crowd. Look at us, our selling selves in the world again, committing to this orbital mess. What is the curve, the horizon meeting my shoulders? Where does the curve end? I told a friend last night that I thought it would be a plane crash, one blazing bird tumbling me to the next hand. He says—his sight half-gone, another silvery operation after another— Not me, I go pecked to death by a hummingbird slowly, inconceivably torn apart. This is how we turn, so rotated and spun in our own isolations. The end is a circle, it comes again, and again. Do not erase me. (Yes, we say it.) Do not erase me. The path is forgotten, but we are still walking; we whirl out our limbs to the defeated world, this city’s tiny blue welt of sky, say, We’re molded in metal here together, we contend with catapult, we will stick this spun-surly life out. Towering in our blooming darkness, our bodies of bronze and blood, our end still ending, our reach only missing and missing the door, we still keep walking, we still ask for more. —a.l.