The open mouth
If it gets so dark
that singing seems
to stop
like a final answer
to that constant question
would you find me
where I wait
in silent suspension
open mouthed or tight-lipped
and remind me back
to music
one faltering note
at a time
to the beginning of the first
song?
Would I know
what lives
at the bottom
of the first
breath to rhyme
with the heights
of the last?
Would it know
me? Could it
enter, even
then?
Morning
Somewhere behind a fence
a child, still breathing, dares
to ask.
Before expression.
To hear, I wanted you, the language that lingers on the tongue long before a word is spoken, pulsing reverb in the throat.
Intentional geographies
I know you dreamt of wings
but all I can make is maps
of words
and I hope
one day to sketch a way
back to a moment when
you knew carrying hands.
Of elements.
Beneath waving drapes of midnight, these lines
draw us out in the swell where the first caught hook
leaves the longest scar. No, love. You cannot go
back but to the opening or you lose it all to danger
us in this work of finding what the cynic masks
until mourning song against memory’s loss, by
turning heads to the young at the breast to owl
until we catch ourselves on trees. No we are not
birds we must ask for song first also love and
what comes suggests we are light, lighting
the eye back to her first sound and the shine
that preceded too the open mouth that
meant the beginning of you.
From a chasm
When the gods of the golden wars are done
pruning the immortal siege of us I hope to still
call after some bird of the unseen, come, I will
feed you through the yawning lull of an entire
day the wonder of its grace long taboo, a sin
hidden in shadows of imperial gaze, amid
the absolution of the drones, the least among
us long translated to the lesser of two knowns
a third way buried in the blast still calls with
breaking voice Time says to me, o Space I fast
become a body petrified in my eternity and I
admit I am a vapor now, the scent of displaced
selves nosing tracks along scorched earth we fell
to track this body back to knowing you before
that severed joint
From the pit.
What hungry mouth still stirs here at the breast of its bloody becoming, to scratch light from the surface of a longing night? Another winged man at a precipice, weight of the albatross discarded from the neck in favor of stolen flight.
What passes through the bent arch of towering bridge between shores, each with a resident watchkeeper long decided too mad for words––who has given them up entirely, according to reports, the haptic philosopher keeping time by the hand and light in a window that the pilgrim near collapse may shine forward from denial, through settled fog and into the arms of a dance poised for its cue.
In winter.
May wind seed a lullaby to dive us from this race and faces fall from ourselves and their constant choreography into another current, its fluid wing of night bird, to sing the hour’s next beginning.
Shift change at the city gates.
The turning happened where we almost ended, feeling the old king’s gaze, the walls of his long sleep around him, each drowsy syllable dripping from the mouth a study in the effects of subatomic explosions.
How long? We wondered, had been wondering. We shivered, had been shivering, naked in the shadow of the fortress. The next cold rain started a whisper among us, in the direction of concessions. What was the point? with the freeway cars above us hissing Yes.
We could have run then. I think we almost did. But one dropped her knees to the grass and then her ear, and we followed, to hear who was coming beneath our soles to be counted, even now.
In the late days of long wars.
We wanted to mend, so kept company with our mothers’ ghosts. Our yesterdays were wounded and came to us until every bed was full.
O muse. Your song was bleeding out.
We brought cloths and went to you. We wrapped you tight and held against the flow. It entered then.
We are still, holding.
