calibrate

 The smoke curls, the leaf burns and flecks, the flies pace out their measures. Chitinous limbs and gossamer wings, flit and still, flit and still. They abide in swarms and tides, each fly a plot and a mission, a future foretold and a plague to come. They imbue the machine then mock it for parts. They let the sentience settle, let it soften as it foments small motions, little cinders brief sparks. The number will occur, after the ends are tabulated, after the telling at last ensues. The numbers another byproduct, the dust knocked loose by the mind making space, more names and aims and implied engines. Witness the coming conflagration, calibrate the instrument if there’s any instrument left, then see what words are left. Abide the plagues, and then let’s see.

Spitting wet tobacco leaf and the last dread embers, trod on and scraped off by the dwindling day, heavily beneath the lean of the urgent dusk. Shed within the welling shadow, the coming night, the broken off breath where the breathing took a knee. Fastened bolt tight to the framework by the spill of simple physics and the particulars of a vestigial faith. Somewhere the drum, somewhere the galley, somewhere the stars to set it right. The smoke uncoils, climbing to the pine needle middens of the eaves, working out the offering and the dependings. The magic left to speak to the missing magic.

The dusk and all at once the night is at it. Ruffling all the pretty feathers, rattling every relevant gate. Every root sooth in rumors, every marrow whispering like the wind. The nevers all come home to roost, to the shards of the heart, the claimant and the stranger mingling silhouettes in the dreaming. The machine slows, feeling the shifting of the senses, the turning in the tongue and its tenses. Twilight presses its pretty petals between the strata in the sky. The brittle of the mystery there but for the speaking. The shared breath and the ramparts, and the iron burning bright. The ambling of the language, the tumbling of stones beneath the tide.