Anorexia

 

–at 16

 

 

There was a doctor who asked if my latch key string 

was a fetish. (I’d lost that key, falling, so suicidal 

I was a bird.) 98 pounds, hips like ears, 

maybe you know the story–

in hospital, a Russian man wept in bed, 

having no English, one night, showed me his scars. 

I saw hunger was Judas‘ silver–so clean

and short-lived. Starting to read: 

Mid-Autumn full moon, the luminous night

Is like a boundless ocean. A wild

Wind blows down the empty birds’ nests

And makes a sound like the waves of the sea

In the branches of the lonely trees.

Rexroth, old Chinese, a deathless root system

of poems–soft tyrannies of song–I was empty already

of everything else.