I, Clark (A Confession of Empathy)
I, Clark (A Confession of Empathy)
(Clark Kent)
The light from Krypton’s passing
washed over this world centuries ago.
I’m sure that, somewhere, there was
a child watching the sky, wondering
how to mourn the vanishing of lights.
I wonder. I wonder how anyone
makes the loss of anything okay.
I’ve never understood eulogies, epitaphs,
elegies, memorials built from stone, stretching
into the sky. I’ve never found words
weighted enough to bury the manticore
in my heart, the one jealous of the stargazer
who drank the last glass of Krypton. I
pray the taste lingered, clung hard to the palette,
the way light lingers in extinguished retinas–dripping
between synapses, cold as the shroud of space.
Krypton’s ghost could still be seen—sepia photographs
stuck to the mirror and mane of the Horsehead
Nebulla—if my eyes were better.
I look up, (––) and away, but my eyes
are stopped by lead and the looking glass.
Appears in Atlantis.
Taken from “…hide behind me…”