in smoke and spit

 Of course the heat held out. These were the hours of melting ice, the time of the rising tide. The words would wail and wail and the days went by unchanged. The long lonesome in smoke and spit. The turn of wings in a burning blue sky. The wait of want and the wait of truth, and the place you save that no one’s going back to. Some old man to sit and smoke, staring down the difference between the days. Some old man to wait and watch, never missing who you are.

The afternoon is all rushed traffic and slow shadows spilling from roof and tree. It is heat and a clamor of birds, a stir run through the innumerable sparrows. The rumble of a quarter ton truck and the hush of a prim electric like plastic caught in its wake. The dogs laze and pant, though the shade is aged and thick. The world ends in slips and slivers, lapses of etiquette and service outages. The world ends when you can only speak of its pieces, once it has stopped not being one thing and has become its becoming. Only word and witness in my keep, I witness mostly the outtakes of other lives. I see you, but I don’t know you well enough to wave.

An unseen falcon calls, then flies away in swoops and slices and the power of invisibility. The song and the thought caught in my mind at the time round it up to something. Here like a tree or a chair or a cracked foundation. Here like words on a page, drizzled with lapses and punctuation. The where and the why just what after what. Another cup of coffee, another cigar, another fantasy. The love tends the stones and the ashes, another day to burn away here on this faraway shore.