hear the world in a mist or spell (Not Otranto)

 I’ve given up on trying to understand what poems mean from the author’s perspective, because sometimes it feels like my brain doesn’t work like that. I’m much better at reading lines and molding them into my own perspectives. Poetry from rephrasing other people’s words. Transformative work, I guess you could call it.

Otranto by Barbara Guest is interesting.

Now understand that I don’t know what it means at all, only what it can mean through my lens. I only understand the italicized lines in my own way. I take snippets and I don’t care for the whole. Otranto is a place in Italy.

The ghost in their nostrils like a memory of a smell that makes you ache and puts tension in your head. They only see the moon as it wanes away. Never say nothing can’t ever mean anything. 

Words burnt if they quickened. Faster out of mouths, tongues causing friction to catch on fire. The ship means something to create a bridge of worlds, take him somewhere new (or anywhere at all). Hear the world in a mist or spell, under a spell of faraway. The shared bitterness on skin, between teeth, salty tears, sweet smiles, bitter ink. Mosaics cracked still seem untouched. 

Borrowed sky asks for seeking direction, I’m directionless, pointing north in my sleep and every other way when awake. 

In smoke, in print, in dark. In print on fire, burning words and lighting up the night. Here’s something for “transformative”. Learn from invaders who crave it, how to burn something holy.

Armored wrens, soaring so heavy, falling so weightless. Beak-mark arrows to the heart. 

Night through a screen, eyes burning from light after the sun goes down. Can’t close my eyes, can’t sleep though the heavy pull of unconsciousness draws me closer. Always on the edge. Ghosts they store, then bring it out of hiding. More than a few still sleep in the closet. 

Watch as the towers bend to one another, heads bowed as if speaking, structure creaking, drawing into some cosmic pull. Much like sleep, only more destruction.

Drag a carcass over a blunt road like a roadkill animal. A funeral pyre for a body-less soul, they will never find it. On a ship somewhere, covered in mist. Maybe a killing’s taken place.

Whatever this is, it is not Otranto.