Our spectacles
Where are the bones to rattle? When the wind moves it may find only these trinkets we used for cheering the spectacle of the hour. C’mon, the saying went, lighten up, and we waved the shining tendrils of metallic-plated streamers at the end of plastic sticks to make our own wind. It did not cool us in the end. No one could stop to say it, but there were moments when those ribbons caught a light like something you might put out to bring a body home.
Those bones. That sound.
Up and out
Just beyond the cliffs where once we looked out, yearning to know it all, now the head flowers a cloud of dandelion-white, prepared to scatter at a breath over sands into the next tide.
May another
If from the blackening leaves of the desecrated tree at the center of a wounded land of murdered angels and blind kings it is possible for new growth to arrive, may it come soon, protected from poison, from burn, from the heavy tread of killing machines. May we learn at this end to be shields for another beginning.
Dream imprints
Mornings, I wear a dream veil
to blanket the known tracks
in fresh snow, melting them
back into unknowns.
Dear friend, with birds
When we last spoke it was to let you know I wished you love. I meant it, knowing we would not speak again while you were in that life, warring at the end, to defend your fortress.
I hope that when you went, the solace of those trees you watched, with whom you often grieved, gave you shade and took your sorrows. I hope the birds were there too, singing, and that at least one of them gave you a good and hearty laugh.
Love is funny how it moves and feints. Those beams when they come can sometimes be too bright to bear. I hope that in that company, that laughter, that light breached your heavy walls, and took you in. I think it did because I am seeing you again.
Call and response
And since it was no good sitting like that, choking in the sweltering attempt at stillness, the youngest among us started crying and the rest joined in. It was wondrous! Lamentations get short shrift in a culture of bucking up and keeping calm but look where that’s got us. We wept until we exploded with laughter and then we wept some more until we were singing. No one had the notes or the words and no one could remember them later. But in that moment, we all knew––by heart, as the saying goes, without faltering. The wingbeat of that hour dawned an owl in the heart of us, to call who? Who? and howl, and the only way to keep on listening was to call back, and we did.
Rise, even now.
Here is a rose for you
grown of this thorned chest
where breath so long scraped
tatters into song.
Mouth after the tail of itself––to eat it, too.
Even amid the abundance of that offering, you were distracted by that incessant worry over the stability of your reflection in the glass, thinking that perhaps you could not steal enough to compensate for the original trespass, and it is true, after all, that some suspicions, nursed long enough on themselves, can only find their error by proving themselves correct.
Right here, overseas.
Against the weaponed horizon of that giant’s resolution and a terror so common as to be de-barbed by dailiness, one may wonder, what dwelling is this? Cushioned cradle that may spring in the next breath catapulting some feeble syllables of the last exhalation on an often named but never understood strangeness into the end of history. But it never had a mirror or a bare face, did it? We knew it only ever by its masks. Which one is this?
Beyond imagination
You think a foothold is what you want, but maybe not.
Who needs to hold when you can flash away, a fish?
Swimming off now. When I awaken, I will remember
but not flinch, still tired but able to follow but not as
solid, to do the next part in dream and here is one
where the pearl of a long illness rolls itself
into light.
