the workings of the worm

It stares with the gravitas of ancient bronze, attuned to the sound of furtive shadows blooming beneath the bluster of early stars. It waits just around the corner, it slips off its shoes, knowing your plans and intentions. These days the nights seem to all bunch up at one end, huddled with the angle, obeying the inevitable sloping down. These days it is watching even when it forgets to own any particular eyes. It is hard to contend with the roll and stot of tomorrow when all your weakness makes it hunt you that much harder.

I sit here, leaning into this freshest empty, a still and wilted Friday after a week of sweat and dirt and labor. Scraped up, bruised, and bitten I sit, still too tired to shower. My flesh feels as if it wants to crawl straight off my bones. My skin crackles with each flex and stretch, every fist and finger. My skin radiates, simmering in the sunlight that just will not leave. Once there were a retinue of tomorrows, waiting to attend to me. Now each new one seems to be daring me to cross over that scraped sand line. Now it is hard to tell if I can take them even one at a time.

It was a day of flowers and splinters. It was a day of ache and longing and the comfort of knowing your limits. Startling colors and humbling weights. Out among the rough tangled endings, out here in the bluff splendor of life moving on, I do not seem to learn. Tomorrow's attentions are nothing like love. It is the affection of the plow upon the workings of the worm. It is the blind corner and the blessings of the cliff.

utility

So it is with things that are broken. So it goes with the time once it's spent. Sort these stragglers by shape and color. Sort them into blacks and blues. No-one will remember the order. What is there to know about an absence once it is gone?

Faceless days and sleepless nights, each mistake a nest of knives, each credo a swarm of swords. Scratch at the fresh wounds, leave the stars to seek out the old ones. The weary bones sing out your secrets as you walk. The hands that tremble when they are left with a need to speak. The words that fall like spent brass to the pavement. Evidence or salvage, depending on the leaning of the witness and the fading of the moon.

The days are laid out in dull strata, fresh dust to discuss, thick loam to long after, and the fossils we think will explain us. The songs we sing along to, despite the absence of any music playing. The constellations laden with light and stories. The crippled limits that somehow still leave us wanting. There was more once, not only this mean measure. Not only the driftings of so much waste and wander.

sisyphus

The gray reach of the storm touches everything in sight. It makes rivers from rooftops, slickens the glide of every daring wing. It bends words and the things they have settled on, confusing the distinction between field and pond, road and gutter. It flays leaf and pavement, animal and machine alike. It is that torrent of life and ache, and it flows from livid sky to callow soul unfettered and free.

I often meet my limitations, they set upon me in contentions packs, proud and unrelenting. They drop in uninvited and unannounced, and lay in with their fists and futures. I watch the rain tower past in gushes and in gasps, dowsing the wreck of my work. The piled up planks and rails of the old fence I have dismantled, the tangles of vegetation I have cut and torn. The fresh lumber awaiting my attentions, unaware of my lack of skill and foresight. Rain falling down, as I so often do.

There is a tender longing that accompanies the rain. As it falls I can feel all of these loves and losses more fully, the cleansing ablution that reveals the surface of the wound. Sore and bone-soaked, I felt completely beaten by this demolition I have engaged. Without any solace, without any light inside to comfort or to guide me, I continued on my course. The rain falls, pelting skin and cloth, and I am tired and more than a little lost. The storm is indifferent, and it is beautiful. My incompetence immeasurable beneath the flow of all this glory. The loveliest of sorrows, knowing that this world will continue to get by without me.

Sabbath

Flecks of rain baptize the pavement, the promise if not the act of washing away its stains. Crows leave their high roosts in ritual alarm. Clouds crawl by above it all, aloof and lost in their wounded thoughts. The street lights flicker, as if they were waiting for someone to come along and just finally tell them what to do. The parking lot at the Lutheran church is bothered and busy, its congregations not sure what to make of this winsome rain. I drag along, compressing morning routines, one dog in check, the other in tow.

The birds stir just before the coming bath. The ubiquitous and irresistible crows of course, and the sparrows slipping through the gaps between leaves, and the scrub jays hectoring somebody's anxious cat, and the egrets fickly picking out a place to dine, and the ducks in need of hobby to still their tongues, and even a woodpecker working away at some phone pole grubs. All the flocks and their tribes, above and beyond us, as we make our small circles and leave our trails of craft and ruin.

The recipe for rain becomes the weight of the clouds versus the ease of the air. The rainfall is the exalting of anticipation up close, the water-color streaking of the hills in the distance. The small explosive dog does a little dodging dance each time she feels a droplet; the large shambling one could sleep beneath the advances of any seedy deluge. The walk ends, with no-one much satisfied. The lilies of the field and the birds in the rushes, the rain on the roof. Coffee quaffed with an eye on the clock, my labors always seeming to beckon loudest while others keep their sabbath.

something settles

The day ends its half-hearted procession in a flow of gray disarray, the music of the wind whipping the clouds into riot the last song played before the languid descent into another faceless night. The fluid beauty of an ever changing constant, that river feeling when you finally reach the water you could only hear beyond rock, fern and tree. Awash in the white noise calm, wearing that sinking ship smile best kept for untidy endings and brutal truths. The sky speeds by, a tide of leaving light.

Dusk comes on with that wallflower feeling, the sense that there is no dance to be had despite all the music and the wild dancing. The sorting of imagined priorities, the cast off gloves of these bitter, leading questions. The sorts of things you say to yourself when you run out of typical ways to wound you. The devil's narrative of failure and lack, the hard cold facts of where you went wrong. Darkness nestles upon glass and lumber, saving the last dance for another kind of revel.

There is that moment, when you know you should sleep. When you know you must change something in the mix before the rough house herald gets out of hand. When the self involvement of contempt can only lead down the ragged and unpaved road of lines crossed and tomorrows scrapped. The wind rolls down over the darkened streets and empty eyes, unfettered and hungry, dancing its endless reel. Something settles, just out of sight. Something settles, its belly glutted with lonesome souls and last words. You want to see the stars, but know instead you better watch your step.

anointed

Belabor the point. Overcome your reticence. Say exactly what you mean, in plain words, measured evenly against your intent. State your case, make your persuasions. The distance between us cannot be bridged with thoughts or words. There is that space that travel never bridges, a lapse between minds, a blind-spot that we can not perceive. Understanding is so rarely understood.

I feel your frustration: strange in my words and ways, I drift further from the commons while soaking up their many tragedies. Days fade and nights burn, the candles cast their wishes in heat and smoke. The weeks stretch like shadows at dusk even as the years topple like dreams. Time slides under the door, a note left by a recent stranger in a hand I am too tired to read. Finding the key to these translations seems an after thought, having been outside a little too long.

The long sleepless night looms before us. Heaven above you, and the stars strewn all about. The rustle and sway of green limbs, the staggered foot falls of a dozen broken revels, the plaintive note of a worried cat-- these are the depth of my mysteries. The ghosts that haunt my watch will not reveal their motives, and in that we are in agreement. God or devil, lamb or wolf, everything that lives and eats eventually is meat. The body and the blood cast their magic and their perversions. If I can not fear or love you further, I ask some indulgence for my ignorance and my limits. Let my soul go, and worry about the feast you will host. Let me fall as I may, and worry after the hunger that will have your anointed flesh and holy bones.

this small sad moment

At this moment the moon is gone, slid off the sky on bright blue rails. Shadows are long and touch toes with the objects they caress and entomb. There is a quiet reckoning, dirt and shovel, worm and bird. Things are put on their shelves, things are put in their places. The absences and contradictions are staggering.

Every thought gets stuck in flesh, dull ache and heady fever. All the slanders and accusations. All the missteps and retellings that live forever in the mind. Tears and fury, washed down with a little hunger and thirst. The words buried in the sleeping earth. The many days left to carry the weight of this fresh empty.

Time gets trapped in all these bloody sparkles, the chains we drag when trolling for ghosts. The grave we neglected to fill always open, even when filled with rock and dirt. All the spectators, all the witnesses, the jeering dead-eyed crowds that infect this small sad moment with their tin-eared repartee. The irreversible and the inevitable, the useless collar and the pointless bowl.