missal

Sometimes it’s the grief, sometimes the gravity. Sometimes it what the flesh contends, some urgency of appetite, some embattled old ardor. The sun recedes behind slow sea clouds, the wind goes dancing through the trees. A heavy breath, a double spaced pause, the gathered and the dance. The arguments of the unseen colors, the hints gotten from the fringe of hue, the patois perception steeps of us getting in its licks while the world imbues us with its getaway greens and discount blues. The light arrives and reads us aloud. The ceremony shakes out somehow.

So it’s the front porch as the over casts. So it’s black coffee and sacramental smoke as I lean into my indolence, while the neighbors heard their scads of children, and shelter in place orders go largely unobserved. The yard does its thing and I do mine, weed green and lonely old blue. The day wanders off and the dogs take turns, with fence post assemblies of the local gossip covens spilling into the streets. They rove and revel, as if they are among the blameless blessed. I am a stranger to their faiths. I hold to no mysteries and serve only my own madness, the waiting world above and below, and the absence of your archetype.

The world stirs, strained and graven around the humans, fluid and vernal through the true. We die in droves, we grasp at straws, we issue declarations as if they’re going to help. The words work us through the abruptions and impacts. The words tie it off where it’s bleeding out, the words tie it up neat and pretty with a bow. As if we were ever more than ribbons scattered. As if there was ever more road than the one on through. This is the ghost that longs for resurrection, the tripping tongue, the reserved breath. This is the reason left of all the ritual. The place where the animal at last escapes.