Brokenness Known

Lauren Swift

brokenness known
intimately

surgeon hands the interior
mind chasms the learning burden
music lungs staff strings new-birth melody
digger brushes ancestral bones
artist brushes the onera of bodily composition
beauty brushes vanity guise

skin to skin like lovers
I to solitude
as deep as
the greatest ocean depth
yawning width such that
no humanly-engineered ceramic
might keep its atoms bound
when sunk in
to anodyne waters—
those touched by nothing unnatural

diving divining plunges
no fear; as far in as the core
has already been brushed
with flesh, hands.
the relationships are congenital—
birthed with them already inside.

cartography can draw
no name
for the deepness
that we know things