relent

It’s 3:30 in the afternoon the way it only can be on a Wednesday, on a clear eyed day in the summer just after a beast of a heatwave at last relents. And leaves stir beneath the spinning winds, coiling hellos and goodbyes from the branches, the vivid scenery through a dirty window shining just so in the only set of eyes I’ve ever known. I start and stop in thick strokes of circles, the brushwork of blood and breath as the signals fire away, like any rooted thing some how turning towards the light. Here I exchange symbols for what I sensed despite my many impediments, magic beans for living beings, the world emptied of all but the incantation. It’s how the love is lost, how the hands are emptied, the sea of all I couldn’t imagine. This day and all I’ll never know or see.

This is one of the received worlds, the framework and the focus. A wording left over from some singalong. Clock and calendar, the black phoebe on the rusty porch swing, the dint of detail and the manipulative lens. This little spat of wonder, these fits of want and hunger, the laborious repetition that spin our habits into ritual. These actions that reveal the moment we were hanged from, the spice we paw for first. I am stuck in the sad and weary, I keep witness to the burn. To use the words until the ink rubs off. To surrender the shell for the seed.

I crack my back and plant my feet. There are always motions in need of going through. Traffic passes in wave and gleaming particulars, the flash of sunlight reflected through the screen. There’s the sort of wind that comes on a Wednesday, a sense of motion to hold my eyes open to the glare of a summer afternoon. This blue that wants so much to be the first blue on your mind, though it knows it will always be those eyes instead, this big spill of sky running late to the day. And you see it there, flashing before me, teetering legs and failing eyes. Seeing it as I never could, this moment where the prize had found me out, this pause before the work of the earth.