To Daniel Day-Lewis

Lyrics

Still I sit, transfixed, whenever it comes on. You, wrapped in a flag that is not yours, but wearing it closer than your own skin. You, in that rocking chair, speaking through a mouth brimming with firstborn hubris, first to the tit, to crush it in your budding American teeth, rising from the soft, pink earth like a city streaked with blood. I know you are a shy man, but this is something animal; lean & stalk & leopard, the Leopard King of the New World. Rocking back & forth, slicing the throat of the air with your thumbs, how did you find it? This choice of thumbs, always waving, wagging, plucking, as if demonstrating your superior humanity. & then in the theatre, a bullet in your gut, those thumbs held stark against the noise lifting itself from your throat, all beast, a thousand frenzied leopards turning the hunt starward, sprinting up fields of wind, I'm saying, in that moment, you could have held a star in your teeth, cracked it open & sucked the bright grease from your mustache, I'm saying, how do you make your way into that middle- ground between man & what once hunted us? Like the truce, finally, like hand clutching paw & shaking is the shape of your heart. & when you tapped the glass eye with the knife, our blood matched that rhythm exactly, magnetized to the blade, begging for the blade, your spine, a blade of wind. How were you eight feet tall, Daniel? Even without the top hat, you stretched upward; a lighthouse leading a city into the angriest center of itself, a lighthouse at the bottom of a whirlpool of blood. Was that the image you repeated while flipping through the pages, a mug of tea in your cobbler's hands, pacing in your garden: A lighthouse at the bottom of a whirlpool of blood. We all know the stories: you, sitting across from Leonardo at lunch, staring him down, sharpening a knife. You, becoming ill, refusing medicine that did not yet exist, refusing clothes thicker than the time allowed for, but still listening to Eminem on your iPod; your slender body a cord plugged into his rage, knowing exactly what you needed to enter best the story. & how you wept over that rabbit, climbed full yes into grief & turned it off like blowing out a lantern with such horrifying charm, all of that glow leaving so sudden your face, that lens so many faces have passed through, so many names, so graceful & so terrifying & what if I never make anything like this? What if the thing I love the most turns me away at the gate? Daniel, I will be here still; searching your face like a blueprint for an entrance into this kind of telling, a portal into this kind of believing, a doorway into such reckless becoming.