I Was Told the Sunlight Was a Cure by Hanif Abdurraqib

I Was Told the Sunlight Was a Cure

 

for the cloak of despair thrown over our bright & precious

corners but tell that to the lone bird who did not get the memo

dizzy & shouting into the newly unfamiliar absence of morning

light from atop a sagging branch outside my window—a branch

 

which, too, was closer to the sky before falling into the chorus

line of winter’s relentless percussion all of us, victims to this flimsy math

of hours I was told there was a cure for this. I was told the darkness

would surrender its weapons & retreat I know of no devils who evict themselves

 

to the point of permanence. and still, on the days I want

to be alive the sunlight leaves me stunned like a kiss

from someone who has already twirled away by the time my eyes open

on the days I want to be alive I tell myself I deserve a marching band

 

or at least a string section to announce my arrival above

ground for another cluster of hours. if not a string section, at least one

drummer & a loud-voiced singer well versed in what might move me

to dance. what might push my hand through a crowded sidewalk

 

towards a woman who looks like a woman from my dreams

which means nothing if you dream as I do, everyone a hazy quilt

of features only familiar enough to lead me through a cavern of longing

upon my waking & so I declare on the days I want to be alive I might drag

 

my drummer & my singer to your doorstep & ask you to dance

yes, you, who also survived the groaning machinery of darkness

you who, despite this, do not want to be perceived in an empire

awash with light in the sinning hours & we will dance

 

until our joyful heaving flows into breathless crying, the two often pouring

out of the chest’s orchestra at the same tempo, siblings in their arrival & listen,

there will be no horns to in the marching band of my survival.

 

the preacher says there will be horns at the gates of the apocalypse & I believed even myself

the angel of death as a boy, when I held my lips to a metal mouthpiece & blew out a tune

about autumn & I am pressing your ear to my window & asking if you can hear the deep

moans of the anguished bird & how the wind bends them into what sounds like a child

clumsily pushing air into a trumpet for the first time & there’s the joke:

 

only a fool believes that the sound at the end of the world would be sweet.