We gunned each other down,
gunned each other down in the street, abandoned
each other unburied. Later, those left bearing
the palls burned to show their love. Burned to light
our streets with the dying asterisms of their rage.
And we watched until our watching made of them
a carnival: He, the twirling fire-spitter.
He, the glass-walker. He, the sword-swallower. He,
the smiling bullet-catcher. From our vantage,
we allowed ourselves to admit no wrong. No
wrong. We were only watching. We were only
breathing in. Breathing in. Breathing in the ether
of routine and accumulation. When we came to,
the field, where in fall children trotted back and forth
like a cloven herd, eddied with snow. Wind-driven snow,
the field buffeted with thin, cold clouds along its camber.
Wind-driven, an uprising of whirls gathering
into the clawed shape of a loss we did not know
we felt. That we would have said was not ours.
That returned into itself. That returned into itself,
no trace. Like breath into breath. Snow into snow. Flesh
into flesh. That leaving no trace, could not be ours.
IAIN HALEY POLLOCK’s second collection of poems, Ghost, Like a Place, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in September 2018. His debut collection, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He teaches English at Rye Country Day School in Rye, NY, and is a member of the poetry faculty at the Solstice MFA program of Pine Manor College.
