in the year before it turned
Now comes the year of French cooking from a book purchased used outside the school penned by a woman who knew the old country before the war, the smell of its cows, soft hides furred and warm in the sun, how does someone get to be this woman? thinks our reader drawing toast and butter against visions of onion soup against hunger adding more salt to toast, who cannot get enough.
People on the screen after the fires and the floods announce plans to rebuild. Maybe it’s no good trying to interview those who won’t, who just stand there without words, waiting to accept. So the hopeful in the aftermath are a self-selecting group, at least onscreen.
The bones had to set when we broke them and we set them in the earth amid the burn, in the skeletons of former homes, still smoking to grow new cells.
Hold still, they told us, meaning faith but without work––it looked half dead in mirrors. We listened for wolves and saved the prints in boxes for someday sorting into proper displays. But what do you name the waters rising high enough to occasion a jump to the next roof, hoping it holds?
Hey Siri what do you know of shelter? It was something to do when knowing you had no service did not preclude the need to speak. We reached ready for the next ledge. She might have said you can wait until dark. Siri we might have answered: I believe, to heal our unbeliefs.
Ghosts before us pointed next and up ahead. We had begged to see it but one wing caught in the updraft was suspended in the act of looking back. It was the wreck we marched from. It looked away singing look away and it was possible to keep wishing merrily down a lane to the land of the dead.
Tracing its thread against honey-slick tongues we offered first milk to those bound close to us until the cold moon. When it came there would be blood and money enough to say we will be okay another year, until that time comes to pull it back again, sun of our sons.
