She asks where I am going, and I say I am going south

To the south of fear, to the south
of awe, of sound, which, unknowingly,
I once called madness for how it bruised
my thumbs after practicing my fortes
in the sunlight, the rising sunlight,
on the piano in the living room
that was thirty-years out of tune.
It sounded better that way, the bones
of each note more feral, the room
left achingly low like the chest of the woman
who whispered rest your hands in your lap
rest your hands each time I’d finish playing.
I fall asleep when she tells me to, behind the wheel
at whatever rest stop in whatever faceless
midwestern town will have me. It is still summer.
I miss the threat of winter. I miss the moment
in the dream where the sky’s illusory blue
takes on the texture of wilted grass, the moment
in the poem where a friend wrote you missed a big,
fiery one, which made me think of the end times
or a lynching, both of which I always imagine took place
with an orchestra in the background, or a jazz ensemble
playing Bird’s “Ornithology,” which sounds like
eschatology to my ear. I like the word eschaton,
the sound of it, like echelon or elevate. I say it aloud
when I am driving, let the last syllable fade slow
and wobbly like the final note of a concerto
played on instruments that were spared
from being used in a burning.

ξ

Tuesday. The first of the vicennium. I read a book about dismemberment 

The leg, severed, is mere flesh.
I touch my own to see if it is breathing,
the sleep not yet worn off. It is windy,
though I don’t know in what direction.
The trees still bare in what should be
the season of new life. A friend sends
a picture of his new daughter, who he
named after a Celtic god. I adore him,
his seed, her resemblance to every firstborn
I’ve ever known. She sleeps a sleep
I am jealous of. I am jealous of the trees,
their black bones hanging above the snow-
covered earth, which is falling in what
should be the season of new life. It is Tuesday.
The first of the vicennium. The first before
the moment before the moment I am appointed
to die. I read a book that tells me so,
that my end is near, and how I am to wait for it
with patience, like the patience of the birds
that fly past the window, a group of them that
I want to call a depravity, the parabola
they form collectively with their wings,
how they waited until this moment, just for me,
so that I could see their programmed act
of becoming, of arrival, of which I’ve made an idol,
or some new octave of hope, an olive
of beginning. The depravity moves westward
toward a city I might never enter again, a kingdom
city named after a saint who was named after
a trumpeter whose hands were made of brass.
The world is wonderful, I will tell a child one day, 
though it may not love you, which is okay, I think,
if still a bit frightening. I read a book that tells me so,
about fear, how it will dismember you
the way any good thing will dismember you,
the way love, its many names, will dismember you
and break you until you believe it to be God.
Or a goad. Or a golem of black and wicked wings.

ξ

Justin Danzy’s work has appeared in The Offing, On the Seawall, New Ohio Review, Frontier, and elsewhere. He was the 2019 Gregory Pardlo Fellow at the Frost Place and received an Academy of American Poets Prize from Washington University in St. Louis, where he completed his MFA. He is originally from Southfield, MI.