I have such little mercy for my own
strong myrtle, for the walkway clawed open
by snow. To talk about deleting

deletes nothing, the way that to implicate
is a wirework, dead twist of tendons
we knot into our hands. I know

that I couldn’t stop seeing the capsule
pulled apart upon reentry, its breath
in strands falling afterward

each one a beating, beating. This is partly
my crime: claw marks in the watching,
how much like a movie it was.

News comes and we are fussy
and quickening until the void calls it back.
We wish to be overheard, make sounds

into soggy linen, stuffed with our own
whereas. I suppose this is how we define
destruction: drill into our gums the outlines

of a world gone. To begin writing,
you must think yourself god,
the lyrical moment when the poet calls

herself poet. These eyes watch waste,
are the same eyes as the writer
of this poem, tired of beating

just to beat. We will ourselves, we two,
to look away, to what calls for us,
to what will call to us in the end.