blue ox

The sun rides the blue tide of sky from one end to the other, its radiance seeding greens and scathing down in droughts and plagues, taking its tithe in lore and language. All the reachings out there towards this unknowable fury, this fever singing fire in the pitch and freeze of spacetime. We ride the same skies, name the great fires and the distant stipplings, all the stars from near to far. Weighing in on the wanderers with our ape heavy myths, the heavens there to ring with our reckoning. Existence unto this static scribble. The words so laden because they’re what we have to work with. The mythos so busy because we never learned to forget. 

It is up to the elders to share the stories. It is up to us to carry the tongue. And it is up to the language to change to meet the spoken moment. The words still there when they can’t be found. They’re just smoking around the corner waiting for their turn to come back around. They’re clinging to some idiom that’s still rattling about. They work in silence, in hands and backs and the ceaseless tread. Deeper than bones, older than the gods and the ones that brung em, they rise from the root path to the starry firmament. These words awaiting speech. 

We stray and we suffer, we plunder and we profit, we slip and stride and pad out the books. Ways wander and they idle, old paths grown over from disuse, ancient rites lost as soon as they left our hands. The prayers get caught in the briar patch, the offerings secured by squirrels and crows. The yard is wild with weeds and intemperate grasses, strewn with bones and dog toys and seed for the sparrows and such. Smoking, still, as the flesh is tended by the cooling afternoon. The limits of this vision, threaded between ways and worlds. The pittance of this witness left to the ephemera. Another age, full of heroes and odd phrasings, left to the tide of blood and breath to inspire.