our day will come

The world is unsettled, the shuffling of the atmosphere and the reeling of the soil. The day turns over and the night disappears. The gray traces of the shroud become pale shadows stitched to heels, the stunned complicity of the sky allowing the chance of rain. It was almost all there, the puzzle known by its piecing, the blade by the resolution of each cut. You step there upon each breath. You turn away, towards another rhythm. Walking into the end.

You sang the kindling back from the embers, brought sweetness out of the ash. Smoke and honey, brimstone and treacle, you wrung life back to the limb. The old songs mingled with the liquor on your breath, they tainted the blood with tears. Art at best is grace, you engaged with the sad sustain between these bitter means and ends. You are the angel of the stress fractures in the firmament. The beauty of both dove and crow.

I am waiting for a storm, waiting with the engine idle. I am sitting beneath a tree, watching droplets spatter the glass. You are singing beneath the framework, your song trickles don my tongue. I would sing along, but it is too soon to say it. I would say it is sad, like some stranger who can not endure such silence. The darkness did devour all the difference left. Between you and all the old songs stuck in my heart. Between you and the voice that lingers when everything else goes home. The molasses black trickle of vinyl pouring into that unseen sharpness, the lilt of your voice spilling over and over into the dark. The rain will fall, our day will come.