recherché

It waits among the ornaments and the frippery, the word unsaid so long because it means something, the word gravid with itself. Something more than the style or the school, something deeper than the shop chop, something more solid than author or artist. The long toothed ones slumbering in between spines on the shelf, the arcane ones lost between the grimoire and the stacks, the technical ones still loitering in the language after the technology walked away. It is the purview of the seeker, the scholar, the priest and the witch. It is the last refuge of the fake, the posturer, the martinet, and the forger. Some become odd because of the redistribution of attention, the contraction of curiosity, the topology of culture. Some only grow odder with use. 

The words that need to be there never wait. They push their way up flights and to the front of the queue, roll back the stone, and make a mockery of time and geography. They slide up on their homophones and show up unannounced. They reveal themselves as path and labyrinth and minotaur, those foldings and kisses and spent breaths. Loosed in winds and sediment, leaking letters through the pages, carved into clay and stone. The slick ones, the secret ones, the unpalatable mouthfuls, the signals and incantations: they need coaxing to the call. At the very least they are a sort of punctuation, a visit to the dictionary or the author’s curriculum vitae. Maybe a rope to keep you out.

This would have been a tirade about a particular type of writer that was really about a particular writer had I gone off as expected. Though some of it was based on broad ideals and craft lore feels about writing, it was really another exercise in bewilderment and envy, there are just some turns my mind can’t get around. It ends up another hill where I’m left for dead. Some strange sad bent, the aimless archiving of these awful moments, suicide jags and the curling smoke. How little hay these haymakers make. How oddly parsed, how unnecessarily put. Some pawned off bauble, gaudy in the light. Some recovered relic, a glory again revealed. A stranger right there, spoken aloud.

monolith

I wake up early, but the wounds wake up first, plain and pure as the wailing on through train. The clock is on, the flesh is melting. Everywhere you look, animals are astir. It’s the stiff in the old bellows, a stiffening of the springs, the day to day and the thirsty work. We wake naked to the grace, stunned little pinky mice fed to the snake of fate. Something moves beneath the cursing dawn. Everywhere, something stirs.

The dawn is still thinking on it and the moon looms high above the waking west. I stagger through the steps, stumble on the path, trip and jig through the ritual. The signature and the clock to punch. The sunrise ache and the day to come. The sweep of the legacy shadow and the ringing of the sky. The earth amid the appetites, the bleeding through the blessed. 

Come to sing to the stone of your dreams. Come to leave to some pittance of an offering. The streets are full and the sirens sound and your in the thick of the rush around again. The love alive in the gutters and ashtrays. The love aglow in the surrendered embers. The mystery there to welcome witness, soaked in the bent of ardent shadow. The wounds awake, and I follow along. Air brakes and birdsong, beneath the labored dailies the world burns.

the misremembered

The moon is coming, but it isn’t here yet. There’s always a lot of inking in to do. The flesh is there but the mind is slippery. It’s best to take it with a grain or two. I allow for the inevitable, but I work off of landmarks and the ways of the stars. The map is in the making, the moment in the all, when you’re there there’s no telling where you are. The moon isn’t here yet, but she’ll make it by and by.

Every memory is an edit. Every remembrance a rewrite. It’s a structural problem, this abstraction pressed into flesh. The river busy at every bend, the tide nothing but discord and complaint. Those clips from kiss to absence, the report of every touch. The persuasion of cant and cadence, the stone smoothed by the insistence of each return, water on water with the certainty of stone. The burning bloom only old and alone. 

There are litanies of sparks and stars. The way the moon’s aura glowed around the crowns and roofs. The fire streaked sky above the car camp lake, peals of laughter and the sounds of reckless glass. The way the rumors lit the firmament, the terrible relentless presence of the thinker in each thought, the primal night full of witnesses and reckonings. The music as the score makes you smile. The piano when your fingers fully wake. In your skin, the motor mouthed geese headed south and west, the traffic and each breath. The window you always leave open, your belly as the moon arrives. 

blowing off steam

The coffee is hot and the air is cool. The steam relents briefly and returns, the instinctual soup spoon gesture built into the ritual. The bright uncaring sun, the you know how to whistle lips pursed just so, the ripples unfurling upon the ink black surface loosing vapor with every huff and puff. The little pig ache a blade in the belly, evergreens and birdsong and the same story all day long. I lift the steel steaming cup to my lips, and almost without thinking, I blow.

Again the calendar turns without a kindness. Again the moon is full to mock and loom. I am all scratching and habits, Mifune as Yojimbo, Bogart as old Dobbsy. More craft than method, more muscle memory than sight read, I run my lines constantly. Every step I take, every table I turn, this vacancy awaits. The hole where my humanity should go, the sodden dreams and the silky soul. Ask the ghosts that linger in the eaves, ask the dead moth that has fallen from your drapes. Ask the cards for the mix and the measure. Cut the deck and call it out. Repeat your threes and add a prayer. There is no safety there.

Some days the coffee seems slow to cool. Some days lukewarm seals the kiss, black coffee lolls on my tongue, these hollowed out intimacies choked down no matter how hard to swallow. The atmosphere tastes your every motion, it rolls and spills about you. It stitches itself to you, blood and breath and hot black mirrors with your mouth all over. The tea leaves and the table. The circuit burning in your bones, this tidal tick and tock. I lift the cup as the wind kisses my graybeard and savaged features. I take a sip of hot black coffee, the usual ablutions as the warmth fills my chest. The sun lingers in the trees, I lift the cup without hope or wishes to my waiting lips. In the long, lingering light, I blow.

into stone

The heart is reckless mechanism. The heart is an essential worker. The heart won’t leave well enough alone. Carrying torches and keeping time. Beating the blood red, threading the sky through through the flesh, stitch by stitch a tuck and a tich. Holding the flame and carrying torches, spelunking through the wheezing depths of the soul’s long dark night. The heart climbs the mountain, the heart gazes into the distance past your disappearance, the horizon just another line. Something drawn in the sand, something visible from satellites, something that the map pretends while the sky washes away.

The day has flattened out, the light clinging with a strange disconnect from the source, the cumulus clouds fitted in curl and scrapings. Dusk comes strolling along well before the sun goes down, the weight of an effortless day surprisingly heavy in the heart. Nothing unexpected, nothing even a little new. An old man thick with stubborn insistence, missing a whole lot of lost. An old man made of mortal wounds and no tomorrows, missing long gone ladies of inconsistencies and fonder absences. The heart wants and wants, that’s what keeps the motor running. The heart plods on, despite all the bitter curses leveled against it.

Oh for the tender and the true. Oh for a little sweetness to take away the bitter’s bite. Living is okay for a certain type. Living goes on long into the epilogue, the common cruelties and the steady descent. The light goes out, the windows turn from mirrors with the advent of the night. The cold carries even on an unseasonably warm day. It works its way into the bones, it sings out in every lonely ache. Leave a light on to find your way around. Leave a light on so someone knows there’s somewhere to go. The joints go stiff, the fists grow hard, but the heart is caramel soft. Marshmallow fluff in these drear days of the growing alone. For all the tender taken away it should have turned to stone. The sundown comes without a fuss. The heart beats on, sticky with hurt and hope.

the moon as it moves

It comes at the uncertain spin of the spell, the benediction by owl or crow, bright atop the tattered crowns of fall. It comes with the weight of the season, tinsel and turkeys and the faith to follow stars. The crisp air turns without a word, at once stilled and startled, the ancient aspect always revealed on sight. The moon treads the boards, climbing up the scaffolding of tree and roof and power line, ignoring skeptic and worshipper alike. Breathless and bared with the wax on bright, the albedo all the onus the motion requires. The moon as it moves, the night as it falls.

There is the point in a dream where the dreaming comes up, where someone shifts skins or the place or action speaks to the husk in such away that the distinction between awake and asleep becomes moot. The flesh and the mystery part ways for an instant and the dream slips out for a bite or a beat. The moon is the traveler of that path, the mundane and the magic mingling in the depths of the machine, the push of the dreaming through skin and bone. The sky, the moon, your eyes alone. The gates open between the heavens and the heart. Blood beating this becoming goddess through the dirt and fever of your knotted flesh.

The moon wanders west. Soon into the tangle of the pines to shine and loom. Soon into the slender ingress of my open window to gossip and to beckon. I hone my alone against the night sky and the scrabble of rat and root. Watch the firmament, watch your step, there is nothing that the night won’t take. I’ve given up on not giving up, so the enchantment hits hard. The moon plants its hints, the moon plays its hand. All my want and lack, the lonely bones, the dreamy seeming call of the impossible and the unlikely. I watch the moon as it moves, envious and aching from the promises it breaks. Between the words and the world we witness, the magic an aspect of this terrible beauty. The drag of this gravid moon upon all this unloved dross. 

innumerate

I tire of the calculations. The probabilities and the place in line, the countless reminders that I don’t count, the proportions and the dishes served best cold. The numbers don’t add up, at least not the way I add them. In tens and threes and multiples of nine. In ones and twos and black dog blues. There’s never number enough. There’s never a way I measure up.

Maybe it’s the medicine, walking in the footsteps of the burned down and broken, the high lonesome always howling it out in my head. Maybe it’s the blows and the blood, too many added deficits on top of the natural absences, concussed and cursed to the core. The holidays heap it on, all the ones gone missing from the rosters. The ones that wouldn’t be there if you paid them. Holes held open by the asking, the answer always in the hurt.

Time to close up the hoped for channels. Time to lock up the doors left open for words to get in. The math eludes and the good has gone uncommon. Graceless pablum served to unwilling strangers the only brand I offer, the offering all but spat back in my dumb mug. What I got either isn’t there or is the sort of thing no one wants for long. The long run of the short form is the contempt of them you counted on. The long and short of it is the same old damn alone.