Where once music, now noise. I mean to sing against the roar of it, to find the others to recover a refrain from memory. To call and call in aria, unceasing, I do––but for today, only shelter. Only weep.
to bird us
some return in music
Tag: song
devotion
study in shade
hear these minor tones, dissonant echoes, nocturnal murmurs
whisper of hellhound behind, tremble sound haunting hollow
taste of revenant ash in throat, beneath each note this velvet
dissonance—
here where sea pushes into land: roaring liquid love, thunder
crashing at the lip of the last wave—and the next.
where Pollock pours black enamel over raw canvas, painting
like a man already buried. Here is love freed from time.
here are the rites of the bull cults, the fetid silence
of hardened blood, evicted angel beating one wing
over trembled flame—
no longer showing but shown through.
no longer singing, but sung into—
by jagged notes, passing through
the charmed demon winding sand
ripping the sails that carried you
and when the sails are gone––
all sea
all sound.
mother to feather
a music lesson
little bird wait
as long as you need
to offer
your opening notes
and when you hear them
come true, sing
as loud as you
can
grails
amid ongoing hush
we shared real questions in imagined time
meaning everything we made there was
unfinished & blood is no fiction it learns
drop by unsparing bird through intractable
dawns singing feathers shrunk to fit tongues
to then expand to swallow us whole into
carrying we carry on like this & sing
vine
and branch
Starlight scatters wound flint paths of old songs to remember scales in rain.
age of achievement
what progress reaps
I remember those eruptions of song that used to ring outside at noon. Now is another time and I don’t know what it is. Now they offer the children to the machine, weighing their gains for jewels to adorn their crowns and they leave them there––the children, now silent.
where will
how, singing?
Hello, bird. Without your forest, you sing a loop from a wire. From where I stand, your presence is a nagging question. Where to live now. How?
one day, birds
arriving to address the assembly
i can’t believe this, you say again,
& keep on. as though to sing
that song of yours in strange words
we do not know. despite myself
you say––
[or in spite of?]
[to spite. the blast]
against scattering & by way of explanation
of why you ––anything. we are skeptics
of this logic & think you are creatures
who do not know what you are
perhaps because you insist on asking
what is this & why
[scatter. return]
we think maybe this is your only song
we think you want help with the singing.
we have seen you watching so we came
for we are the ones who come & go.
Dropping Notes
Rain song
After that drought when rain into dust arrowed murmur of song, new prayers puddled at our feet.
Bird Dreams
Hope in the dark
One day I hope to remember
the song I keep rehearsing in dreams
and sound it.