This poem is called "Untold Pact."
"In an aged barn a born new thing.
Sky as old as clocks.
Suddenly, everything shiny or dull.
The ice comes like rhinestones, deceptive but not at all.
Snow is cheap.
The base of her spine like wrung hands, a worn washcloth
rinsed and rinsed.
The snow falls leaves like love and everything sags
under the sudden lifted weight.
She immediately began a journey towards a dark place,
an open space in the country we think
of when we say the country, where
asphalt mouths a slobbering mirage,
obsidian kissing obsidian.
We know nothing more.
It'd please you to remain nameless.
It'd please you that you forced me to be cruel.
A fool or a kid, a child or a god, unloving.
She moans.
There's little separation between birth and drunkenness,
and the erring therein--
indistinguishable.
For example, she reached for my breast, as you have.
As yours, I expect no less and push her away.
You'd be happy to see the world suffering
so reflected, an heir of your own mind
to take up the yoke, to be an ass.
Sometimes I think of it as prophecy,
my young self haloed in a guest room,
the words welcome in foam board above my crown.
Half conscious, dreaming of myself as fern,
checking my belly for spores and finding none.
Waking sticky, startling from an image, myself in a vase
on a mantel.
Flowers don't matter.
It's winter.
I've cut and buried parts of myself that loved plants
that bloom then die immediately.
I don't need encouragement.
This is the pact we make by being born, that you go on
and I go to waste.
For years I thought it akin to some specific land
and anything can summon it.
But now it is a muted pastel, a part of everything.
It no longer startles."