some brand new now

The wind threads the lapse between sky and earth, kicking its heels up in the dust. Every day another two stitches, another one cut. Each day the bright reminder of so much left undone, the ruin that declaims your way. Sketch to sketch, skin to skin. The hollows gape before us, each deed drowning in the past, every word the ghost of ten thousand others. The stretch of credulity, the seamless transition from light to light, the dense text of deep abandon. One name, then another. The words just plod and plod.

Like it or not, the evidence suggests that there are other minds at work. They seethe through the bones and the brittle synapses, they leap the gaps and mark the paths and claim some road for the virtue of the spill. They build the towers and steal the treasure and foment all sorts of gods and ghosts in the cracks and the seams. They mistake the tangle for the tenor, and happenstance becomes destiny. They mistake their loss and their limitations for a mystery beyond their noisy meat, heaven proven by the reach of trees, the tumbling world the prize to spurn for a kingdom made of wishes and jokes. The world, for its part, takes no notice.

Now the dog hunts a horsefly, its transgressions answered with gnashing teeth and swift jaws. The sun stipples the long lean of the pine. One thing, and so another, then yet another. The stories just go and go. The porch-light on in the tumbling afternoon, the cigar butt smoldering above the gathering of ash, the clock on the wall always naming some brand new now. Life as a journey, life as a burden, life as a poem discovered. Everything said just so, everything treading water and spilling breath, the poetry another symptom of seeing. Ashes on my belly, smoke threading my every breath. The dust dances with the wind, every origin story an ending alluded. All the words written, orphaned on the page.