To Live in One Skin for All of Your Days

Vincent Hostak

November 5, 2022

To live in one skin for all of your days,

to show its folds daily, shake off the crust, 

unlike the pine snake rising up from a crag or 

in the shape of black water pouring down from a bluff,

is knowing, that while you will never be the snake, 

the cheat to right living is

not to name the condition “Loneliness”

if you live in one skin for all of your days. 

To live in one skin for all of your days 

is to drink time-worn water hidden in caves, 

giving scant drops back to the air and the wells,

watching earth wear its age by changing it daily,

doing years of its work in one weekend spasm: 

shores, bays called back to the sea, its

wake taking shingles, cars, and lives into the tide

should you live in one skin for all of your days.

To live in one skin for all of your days 

is to build your life from morasses and bogs,

steal from minnows making do with remains 

then chant out the rivers named in your sweat and your blood:

Passaic, Chickamauga, Platte, Calumet and 

the rust-bellied Chicago, 

waters with purpose from before you were made

if you live in one skin for all of your days.

To live in one skin for all of your days 

is to give these all back to the channels and seas 

without wreckage of cyclones, but sighs of relief, 

to sing out the dryness if you can’t leave a coil,  

call Mojave, Sonora, Chihuahua, Black Rock, 

blessings on these, take what is left,

fill the snake’s path, the gullies, a shelf of rainclouds

if you live in one skin for all of your days.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.