Monday, November 1, 2010

from the burden to the breech

Learning its language, your voice takes on the timbre of the machine, it speaks in hinge and resistance. It speaks in oil and rust. Black coffee in the morning, that ambling liar's prayer towards the dusk. I roll down the window, driving in the morning. I take off my shoes, pacing into the night.

The fall gathers in the streets and the corners. The spill of instruments, the reach of voice as she sings and sings. Stillness moves over the sleep of water. Stillness infects the breath of land. All this, and no relief in sight. All this, the clamor of the poems lost in the cracks of talk. I am a little like a fever on the face of things. I am an itch that lifts the boundaries of skin, the curtain call breaking like waves as you scratch.

This breath that breaks upon your shoulders. This gaze that sweeps your spine. This calamity of failed distance, the persuasion only impact may display. The hunger hunched over your solace, this clinging of scratchy shadows and sticky light. I feel the calendar stitched between my shoulder blades, the years all tumbling out my hips. Gravel is all left to sanctify. You bearing every blessing, from the burden to the breech.

No comments:

Post a Comment

chiming of the vendors

It is there in the playing out of the song, in the fade of the light, in the knowing sway of the neighbor’s palm tree as it seems to pulse w...