reach and touch

Each finger folds inwards, hands full of feelings, every sense a small fire. Both fists balled tight, keeping these settled secrets. Holding these certain truths. The palms feel a flicker of perspiration, the waxy scratchings of skin against skin writing riddles, a message shipped from another form. Hands held out and open, hands clasped against a profusion of prayer, the whole of the world the flitting of fingertips. The whole of the world only reach and touch.

I pour another cup of coffee, gather the cup in both hands, breathe out an offering to the skin of black and steam. I blow and I sip and I set the coffee down. Some days the routine is all in the ritual. Some days the habit is all you have. Steel and heat, light and ink. All of my reasons unfurl, caught in the drift of gain and loss. All these angels placed alight in the gist of catch and release. I hold this portion while the rest flows away.

It is an island where rivers of time go slipping by. It is the selection of the one thing that will not be ignored. The pieces picked, the chosen fields of weeds and debris, rust and rot held close to the staggering of the heart. The flesh unfolds in directed appetites, it finds music in the wastes of want. The fists fail their craft, always beginning to open yet again. Fingers stretch and fan, making much of every little thing.

the burn

The sky surrenders to a mountain of smoke, the day carved from another ordinary inferno, light mingling with the silty sediment. First it is attributed the fire, this blur of the essence of the smoldering afternoon. Then there is that hint of the diminishing of the eyes. All infirmity echoing in the paint and drapery. All these fevers more than the symptoms of the flesh.

We glean all that the day leaves in retreat, these dull glows, these crass enchantments. Stripes of flame sieved through a redwood fence, yellow fires caught in the greens of trees. We sink below the precipice of someone else's coming dawn, memory clinging to the moments before words. Smoke blotting out the stars, the skin so warmed by abandon.

Dusk comes as the distance between smoke and the bright horizon. Dusk comes as a shadow and a hush. There is no record not undone by language. There is no reminder not hobbled by the tongue. The day leaves only skin and heat, the tracks of our rising and bought fall. This summer shelled with the colors of autumn. This season lingering as burn and flame.

the shape

Don't look to me to show how dark the distance, don't ask me to place the points on all those stars. My eyes cross letters written in crows flying west towards their roost, my sight is scratched by the last lingering shine of an airplane shrinking north. All draw and hum, all sigh and scratch. The roof touched by the swaying of tree limbs. The sky only known by how fast it falls away.

The hour is told in empty glasses. The moment is known in the melting ice. Spilled static, goose flesh. The misspelled and the misspoken, the glass of touch, the stutter of taste. Heat swollen in narrow halls and smug rooms. Time cluttered in the corners, turning into dust and shadow.

You are always this measure of absences, this weight of never really there. The whispered insistence of an unseen existence, the rustle of some mythic fabric, the scuffing of slippery heels. Not so much the light but the horizon. Not so much the word but the way. I speak aloud, or at least pretend to. Saying something, or at least making the shapes.

no mercy

Mercy goes missing at the wrong end of the blade, leaving only meat and murder. Whole days dissolve in that spell of blame and blood, limbs slick with the work of seeding the world with worms. We have learned to hide our eyes from death only to go numb when its workings are again revealed. We have learned to embrace slaughter where there is no feast, violence where there is no claim. We think ourselves outside the animal truth, and so our gods of wroth and ruin consume all that we ought to be.

Bruises and scars weave into these blunt imaginings, the toll of want and wishing soiling the gutters and salting the fields. Madmen have written your scripture and hunger for your soul, kings and generals who would burn you for reading light ask for your noble sacrifice. All the ills of our lost tribes without the blessings of kinship. All the risks of our endless wars without a victory to be seen. Bodies stacked like cordwood because some long dead lords tore their songs from the air around them. Illness spread because the deep knowing tells us to heed the words of the ancients.

The whole of the world is broken by soldiers and scholars. Priests and poets crush hope and truth beneath their clumsy feet. Faith in the hole in reason, belief in the riot of the unknowable write this dumb history. The lies are told in tics of language, the lies are rote in notions of absolutes. Ideology as idolatry, reverence only in that which is unreal. The world burns down and all that you honor is a promise made to nothing. All this evil because of a contract made with something less than a ghost.

ran through

We have not spoken for so long you seem now only light and shadow. You pause and the sky tints the stillness in your hair. You sway and the sunlight goes trailing from your hips. These skimmed leavings of remembered hungers, the colors caught upon the greedy horizon. All skin and want and that last hint of wonder. All the words awaiting your return.

You are swaddled in peals of sweat and heat, the wretched press of summer. The wanton liberality of the sun. Those burning blues that engulf the dawn. Those velvet wings of thickened black that swarm each night. Beads and jewels, perspiration and cool water painting the huddle of bare flesh. Stars and diamonds, your eyes caught electric in the changing light.

I wait here as the day burns out. I watch here as the sun falls down. The streets fill with warmed over air, so like breath released unbidden. So like the hush of something very nearly said. The memory unwound, the clocks all gone uncounted. I see you as a series of pictures marking the distance. All the signs caught in the tapestry, all the prayers ran through.

greet the ghost

I greet the ghost in colors of dusk and summer, the latest shade of a losing streak caught in the shape of grape vines tangled in the pine. The dog in the dark cracks away at dead bone, pressing feathers with jaw and tooth. The print of heat still smoldering at your sky seared flesh. That glance that is the root of all appetite.

My eyes are wiped with the lens of memory. My thoughts are shipwrecked along the stretch of your skin. These lapsed speeches of lost longings, these stilted passes made as a car radio blare. The smell of sunlight lightly salting your hair. This blatant reach of the fanciful distance trawling through your name like fingers skimming the sea. Hunger and haunting clinging to the core.

My face is burned, my breath straining. Ersatz stars beating haloes from my head. Bug spray toxic and wind caressed, I slow and slow some more. The day flees as this ghost approaches, the taste of smoke all the light I lost. I shift on sore hips and back-ache shoulders, spill my tongue toward the complaint that makes most sense. I watch that glow dwindling in the distance. I watch as those thoughts sink with-in sight of your shore.

context

The hours boil away, the world burns out. Midnight is a distant country, moonlight a wish spent on a star. This slow surrender, this endless descent, everything listed and lost. The tinny transformation of digits into language, echos painting the walls with their spit and fizzle. Heart and heat clinging to the empty air.

There is more than these words, greater motions than the dull tides of our philosophies. We make up whole hierarchies, stacked ideas and longings and claim them as our lives. We trade the world around us for the pretend solemnity of these sovereign spooks. Heaven only the smoke of every wasted sacrifice. Hell always this burning of the remembered or the forgotten.

This is the memoir of meat and bone. This is the soul of blood and burn. The essence is only the mass and the matter. The truth is only the grease on the plate. The truth is only the gravel on the road. No more questions, no answers at all.