the spoils

It’s a day like any other, drinking coffee in the afternoon, spelling everything out. I find the crow by following its shadow, find the dove by the beating of its wings. There are some dogs and cars, old songs and a bunch of different birds. The circuit wasn’t restarted for me, I don’t see the stitching on the scrim, the trapdoors and turntables and rollaway stones. But I never take a god as a given, so I miss a lot, the sales pitch and the vamping while the basket gets passed around. So it’s dogs and birds and the coming dusk. It’s the rippling foliage in the rising wind, the low ceiling of the rising sky.

Most of what we call the world is a bunch of safe words and stories, handshake deals and ways it was always done. Fashion and habit, convenience and chemistry, so much is only extant in compacts and definitions, placeholders and black hats. You lose the deity, you don’t miss much. You give up the rituals, there’s a room left empty inside you. Then only the next harbor, then only the held note. To the victim charge the spoils. 

So go the days and seasons, so goes the unmarked map. The soft of the afternoon broken by a tide of travel and worship. Calendars and crowns, herds and whole free hearts, the world ripples from every impact. Folding forth from ricochet to ricochet, everything fitted to its set, everything from bite to breath. Rising voices from passing traffic, the Doppler down to the last rattled bass, children shrieking finding colored eggs. The treasure of tomorrows. The stitching to the earth, the seeing of the sign. The riches read in inference, the witness you have wrought among the words.