release

There is the song of the gull, gliding alone in that swathe of gray. There is the sprawl of mud and weeds, stones and the first glimmerings of spring. There is that dissolution, smoke and steam and the upended sky. There is the rain, there is the chill, there are wings unfolding above. The bonds of the earth endure in these tensions without respite.

It is the limitation of memory, that skinned mirror depth, that unflattering clarity. You move as if submerged or consume, lithe and unrelenting. You stretch and curl and reach for some distant with-in. It is that feeling where these wanderings dance and glide, the picture in the puddle, black feathers and raw throats. This song that always is lost in the cloying details of the day.

The life allowed is always the thousands denied, this changes of season and costume, these mistaken translations and shorter forms. My fingers slow, chilled by weather and colored with smoke. The least touch both a loss and a burning, the confession of so many empty crimes. I wake each day without the burden of the risen sun. I wake each day, the same skimmed notions and earnest growls. I am again a little further down the mountain, a little farther up the road. I scatter my ashes while the winter takes its portion, while life burns so brightly away.

relinquish

I am that strangest music, the song played out at last. That familiar sound lost in the static whisper of the rain, bitter innocence now only this wounded tongue, this lapse into sheer translation. The days as cracked as the sidewalk, as hands worn through from that idyll work. The nights so near that they cling to your clothes, a lover's breath having left.

There is something in want of warmth in the prose of so cold a night. There is something dashed and admonished in the whet and hew of such an fitful proposition. These admissions that would never ask, plain faced and without shame the observed demands of place and time. The redundancy of punctuation when the weight of the words fail to hold. The clemency of a desire so vaguely felt and surely met.

You try to find the world, giving your reasons to the havoc of the waves and the gleanings of the sun. You make up the gaps by always falling through, leaping into yet another tether. It can only follow so fast when going so far. It can only be captured by losing the way. It is not so much the song, but the seeming. The sound of rain soaking through.

imagine

The heart settles its business in separate chambers, behind creaking hinges and rushing rhythms. The fitful little mysteries, the frightful tussle of blood and breath always measured by rise and run. These going concerns of life and love and weather, pressed tightly against the ache of ribs. These simple missions of dull resistance and noble sacrifice.

You feel your shadow stretch, moving beneath the tattered sky. That push painting you as shape and stillness as light pours all around. The guileless radiance of this bathing in heat and shine. The sun dwindles into another dead-eyed horizon, and you feel for a moment like a picture trapped on paper. You linger in that distance, a picture outside its frame.

The day will come when the story runs aground. The day will come when all the words run dry. This scatter-shot season of traffic and sirens, of rain storms and sun-burn and the vagrant wind. All the hopes and reasons buried in indifferent dust. All the dreams and burdens at last undone. The heart beaten into stillness, the heart battered by stair and hall. The story plays out, and every telling left to tomorrow's voices waiting to try its luck. Tell me again of all this terror and this glory. Tell me the story of the heart that found a way.

want

All through the day the sky was a riot. Birds rising up on the winds that are sweeping down. Sunlight warming the icy spray that this storm would make of rain. Hail riddling the skin with a copse of shivers. The whole world whipped into spheres and change.

I fell asleep, trying to shrug off the day with drowsy whims, dreaming of ache and hush. I woke in the dead dark of an unlit room, swaddled in the odd tectonics of restless sleep. A tangle of sheets and blankets, a pillow shrugging off its case. Finding clothes, a chill beset me. Human shreds finding the resonance of ice.

The rain treads on, all pause and stagger. The wind wilds by these conspiracies of flesh and cloth. Outside I idle, lounging into the heft of a stretched spine, that unslung reach towards ease. The street is cluttered with waste paper and puddles. Traffic scuttling on with a slickened hush. I spread my fingers through the cold diving sky, every ache an urge set free.

mummy

Will I ever know this bliss again, the rush of the trees as they rise, the rain threshing away each breath. The slow dissolution, that weight of embrace, this blood owed to wild tides and distant shores. That sense of holding closer than flesh and lost forever at once. That scale of hearts and deeds, that devotion like barest dreams upon a mirror, always in truth the opposite of every seeming. So near to the world there is nothing to let go.

This season is the harvest of smoke, the wandering beneath crystal stars, trailing plumes of steam and wonder. This blood worrying the air as heat becomes a yearning, life a craving of aching bones, a striving to endure for that next question, a knowing of the eternal press of change. The rain stitches up sheer curtains, pummeling car and pavement, beading bright in the headlight stretch. That droplet cold against bare lips, that trembling neither grimace or smile.

You understand how I found this, that deafening drumming, that first sight of the worshiped ape. The retelling of King Kong in wonder not of the towering beast, but of the feast of ritual. That strange pagan yearning towards the power lurking all around, that restlessness of ordinary touch, my fingers and their love for busy wandering. The simple pleasure of unfastened zips and buttons, the trust of flesh finding its way, loosed upon the waiting world. Something so close to a kiss, so near to perfect in its dwindling love.

don't look back

My how the brambles rise, into the dead of the night. My how the briars entangle, that bare but beating heart. The moon swells, blunt and bloated among the clouds. The tide resolves these troubles with a life without love. The flesh feels taut, so full of bone and blood and feeling. The skin feels crisp, ready for the least wind to peel it away.

I shift on my feet, feeling each leaf and twig, the dross left awry, scattered upon the cast-offs of the earth. The dusk is gray shavings and clinging mist, touching my face with the ease of unstoppered time. Fragments of granite and quartz sunken into the mud, every rock a marker, every stone a story. Adrift of the leavings of light, the tailings of a day undone, old love litters given way to shreds and mulch. The storm lets loose a long sigh, tree limbs swaying, reaching for some buried depth of sky.

It was traffic and tail-lights. It was the cold dregs of the morning coffee. It was the belabored reasons of a wounded mind. These trimmings caught in that tide, the lively words and the bitter tongue. I read aloud to children, telling stories we all knew could not be true. I read aloud, words spilling like rivers. Words falling like rain.

basement

You will find my name left in ruins, skeletal cacti and that half a moon so far away. It sticks like twilight shadows, desperate to touch every skin. It falls like rain, soaking each breath through. It clings like kisses, that flavor of sulk and surprise. Lit dimly, only finding focus further past alone. Something carefully forgotten, never spoken of again.

This is that sky, so far away. That least hint of a chill spilling down in the night. The prayer for rain answered in paint and fire, clouds tattered for as long as seeing lasts, the horizon all burning rags. This is that depth reached towards or dug down where the stones do not go. That mass only found in shadow, that scripture of flowers and shreds. The call so hoped for, so far from this least reason, so near it might bite.

Twilight left all of the sudden, silhouettes of mosquitoes and the moon up atop the tree. Every step was something brittle and certain, an open door letting out all the light. Leaf and twig, flesh and bone. Walking so uncertain and so artless, some comic rhythm left for the weather to devour, something for the season to sink through. You wouldn't know me if you knew me, so much grace and luck. You will not find me curling smoke towards the stars, waiting for your voice. Just that word, spat out like so much rind.