Chang’e Speaks To the Moon

& it sounds like a birdsong once      remembered,
like the last flicker of a siren after the music fades,

when the ambulance sings, not here, not here.

            Perhaps history is what lives in the bones,
what names a body unfamiliar. Skin, as a reminder
of our own capacity           for loneliness.         To find language
lifted out of centuries & swallow the grief
of a given-name, to soften the ache
of this feeling                  shaped by air          I want

to be endless. O elixir I desired

not for fullness, but for the absence
of hunger. & what is hunger
if not love. What is the soul      if not a lighthouse
in the pale sea of my chest, where I am only
a wave folding inwards to reach the shore / Alone, 

I dream of motherland.          I give birth to myself.