reconnoiter

There’s the angle and the aperture, and all the lofty rhetoric. There’s the stone angels giving you the signal. The miracle has come and gone, with only the stories ever staying. Now there’s chords and notes, scapegoats and golden throats, the landscape of the revelation. Coils of smoke and sawed through rope and the cobwebs in the corners. The window always open, the atmosphere always getting in. 

The waking keeps claiming me, some signaled stress, some set alarm. A dog down the block, the cat on the roof. The wings loosed at once, driven like eyes to seek the sky. The day after day exasperation of the expected, counting by calendar and constellation, the empty receptacle and the sliver of the morning moon. The dreams that need me interrupted by the world that doesn’t. 

The sun comes out and sets the scene. The winds repeat their hastened chastenings. The animal is stricken with some sickness, an uneasy quease about the seams. The entity takes it personally and accounts for the curses, patterns always there for the picking once the seeing gets stuck. Look around, the angels say, somebody moved the rock. Look around, the angels go, the ghost is on the lam. Here I go, the skin of the witness as the angels say come see.