January we awake in the door of
seasons, to another trickster's perseverance,
forgotten in a sleight
of hand. These days we hesitate to wonder what the eyes hadn't seen.
at the threshold
of waking; of the
reverence that
begins a child, we
are born into omnipresence
beside a hospital gown, the ceiling choir,
Loki, a jackal beneath the vending
machine, of thirty arms
he provides himself sustenance,
life to others and death,
death comes only in the dawn of new ages.
The nurse annuls a beginning,
with the only familiar
pattern of a heart, engraved
into the entrance of thought, with the passage
of unseen apparitions. A cross
of distant voices and the
hint of a light were the sun
itself abducted. it diminishes
into the weakest subtlety, into an
unseen path, roamed asunder by the
hands of a hundred thieves.
the siren of the nighttime leads
him from his mother, bloodied
at the lore of reason. as a
stare upwards reveals the infirm
escaping through the lights. How we flee
through the egress of winter.
in two years, in the
sparsity of the land,
from the sultry arrays of haystacks, again
their hands arrange an offering.
Again there are a hundred acres
to surrender to the businessmen. The rain brings
a stillness in the latest hours, to again
flood into the fields; the child
weeps into the night at the
spite of acquiescence. A voice
eclipsed the hollow of dusk, to again
cede as the prey of the rainfall,
and so his halcyon years
dwindle as any others. into
the eyes of heaven, amaranth polished
the passage of the wind, or was
it a pilgrimage? The wind
in the mid-day rush is
the mistress of the tilted window,
beckoning to it as it slams into the wall.
Your father betrays his words
and fills your home with another.
No small repair seems half
as attained, when something of your own creation
stood yet to be mended. The dawning
season rescinds of the children
the verdant illusions that seldom
rose from their hands.
The awning makes no mention of
its treason to the senses.
You called the winding
dirt path a boulevard. Your sister raises
your fingers around the sun, to pull
it into the folds of the land.
"It's mine,
beside my accusations. See, the land
is mine,
as I am everyone,"
she glowed
in the upward surge of the waves. a
knell of fate. All the men tremble as
the wolf emerges from between
two trees, as if marble
columns jutting from the Pacific
carrying the warnings
of every god we've forgotten.
The villagers speak in hushed tones over
those who prowl the wood at dusk. Beyond
the rows of wheat and the treeline, the
sky in the hint of morning is a mirror
posed above the impressionable earth. The deeds
of men in this life, they say, are
scaffolds in the sky, leading at a constellation.
Still here is the afterring
in the cries of every night's bandits. Still
is the silence in the air when the killing
has finished, and their pursuits have uncovered
no trace of anything.
The deceit of dreaming is the comfort
sought by the eternally indebted. There is a hooded man
who stands upon the porch outside,
his face in the shroud of now the
dawning outline. Gloved
fingers curl on the windowsill- the collector.
Sjorn's father, bolted upright at the wrong floorboard, has
a revolver levied at his chest.
"Get back to sleep," in an exit;
he slips through the window and runs.
There is no sight in these moments,
a clockwork soldiers forward and
crumbles at the noise. The howl of your mother
wrought vengeance to the ear.
the patrol
is the tip of the knifecloud of dust, hidden
but for the sirens
that have been sewn into our clothes. Outside they
are stooped behind the corn rows and the barn
inching at the holster. Maryann the spaniel
in the obedience of her lives, disappears
into the cracks of the floorboard amidst
the bullets, like rainfall. It is
a matter of behavior and reward, eventually
her fingers and tongue both lost their dimensions
and so only a projection remained. amaranth
is the shards of the furnace in the wall, gold lines
along the edges of the stream, how we become
median strips when the days drag us on enough. How we
witness the airplanes in a moment's escape, how the
irrelevance of thirty miles below forged
a yellow light, from the ground
thought to cut the sky into pieces.
How the expanse of the sea, rendered irrelevant,
seemed weak to the fortunes of men. Maryann, tucked
between the attic and the emptiness of the sky,
had a word for me, hymnals approaching in parallel lights, across the harbor,
men adorned in the a self-divined garb. A row of candlesticks
and swords raised upward,
in alternate lines, tailor
a torn flannel stretched cross the brick wall.
Maryann shivers in some long-left
propensity to stutter, tears fall like knives
in the longest pulls of winter.
