ordained

It’s no mystery how the spirit passes through, the restless legions of the wind and the innumerable tribes of the sun. The rain awakens the antecedents, the first singers threaded through stone. Wait until the rain calls you. Spread wide your arms and breath it in. Your name, your place, the places where you and others collide arrive. Here from this first breath, hand over hand, knot by knot we climb along this intersection of dirt and rhyme, by the silk and by the stitching. Ordained alone without the counting, the book predestined to be made up as you go. The ghost there in the knowing, and the not. 

It used to be there would be ink and scribbled out phrases, a trailing of scratches and coffee rings, the drift of composition expressed in slips and lists. Now it is the words hung between breath and exposition, the phrasing and the way they land. Something in stepping out of the entity and messing with the instrument’s mix. The causeway of senses and expressions, the conjoined hungers and the intended appetite. The ploys the lexicon makes to drive you to pollinate, pretty blossoms and carnal scents, the way the words lay waste. To have been and to become. The cold because the wind is blowing, the spirit because it says so.

There are paths and there are powers, ways that shape your passage and corners to avoid. You tell the old stories, you tell the first story, and you sing along the way. The devotions of the celebrants, the virtues of the abandoned, the way it becomes grace as you practice. The prayers you know at either end, the rocks and the rain, the moon and the wind. You take it in bruise and blood and trade, you make it in dream and dance and craft. The wisdom of the work put in, the blessing of all you carry. The words you let pass through.