sir duke

From the wilted wish hued blue of the sky spilling over the eaves, from the trees that buck and bow as the wind pontificates, from this slow set gaze of this longest light always reaching for a lost horizon I fall in the moment the song’s let loose. I fall along the ley lines, I fall along the faults, the flattened affect of the undeniable earth. Only the bright deployed in lilt and sigh, note and tone so loosed that all you can do is sing. The here and now and the long ago sway hand and hand, everyone dancing it the best they can, the rhythm slipping like silk and gripping tight as a fist out here in the nevermore. 

We are there for the first reasoned moment. We are there until we are turned back to ash. There where we hear it to the binding in the bright, we turn from skin to skin, then we deny it and burn so fast in act. Between the revelation and our composition, between the resignation of stones and the stir of stars in the short singsong night. A smile all teeth for the taking, a matchless smile that just shakes it off, this fast footwork a tango with the truth. We are here waiting on letters and kisses and oaths, the sky a breath and bloom. We are here at the edge of the epilogue, summed up among the they, the erased in a line or two. The gone and the easily replaced.

Everything’s sacred, everything’s profane— like I heard in that Patti Smith song. I may be mistaken but it goes both ways. I might be wrong but I won’t be at it long. I smoke and spit into the dusk at the long toothed end of a day, the altar and the offering as the lights go low, all repartee and singalongs as the shadows sink their roots and the sky overflows with stars. This moment all that is certain, the hook in the horns, the dazzle of sheer dreams. As the sea pummels the shore into sand the moon smiles in a wry sliver and the trestles shake with trains. Heaven at the cross rails wringing with alarm, I keep to the mystery, I sing along to parts of all the songs. God exactly like they said it is, but backwards and inside out.