Friday, January 7, 2011

the distance to dawn

That cold first breath, steaming out the door. That clasp of grays and shadows, that whispered threat of ice. Walking the world before the sun grants any favors to the season. Walking the world so that my feet will feel their way back from the clotted pose of sleep. Soon it will seem that everything has a story. Soon every ache will seem a poem.

There is a laxness in the architecture, a way that it always meets its limits, lashed at by the weight of wanting always so much more. I limp and grumble, looking down the driveway for more of the morning papers. I clear my throat and shiver, staring into the clipped distances of the street. It isn't really the grinding of the burden, so much as that clumsy work of keeping drowning at bay. Such faith in fiction that it is no wonder my words seem mute. Such honor held in a scattering of worn bones.

I hear chimes and distant geese, the morning still so gray and cold. The metal solemnity of cars idling in the driveway, the gleaming of frost melting, the slow dissolving of each light. The clatter of uncomfortable shoes on cement, the workings of locks and latches, the burying of dreams. I pace out these circles, stamping patterns off my shoes. Every street once a kind of singing. Always striding past the distance to dawn.

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