All bony and moany,
on hollow stilts he walks,
stumbling to a slow pause.
With dimming lamps
he scans the dumbness of air,
then cries at the memory of the hunt.
The plates of his shoulders
stretch his sparse skin,
and pepper spots
remember lost whiskers.
A recent change of heart.
A looming change of mind.
An anxious left-handed day.
I’m seeing more somethings
in the sighing air
Distances to dramas,
beatific in their flash,
are shortened.
Though I once feared the fear,
lungs of sponge breathe it in,
baptizing its fire,
and I am well.
I am well.
In fable days
I took a dare
to try the mortal maze
They shut the door
when I went in
to walk its narrow ways
I felt a fool
and out of school
unlearned in errantry
and suffered doubt
and went without
a thought of parentry
The road is long
I sing a song
in vain, apparently
In a while,
maybe,
I will not know you.
Don’t cry or be afraid
when you do not know me.
There’s a short story
yet to be told,
and it begins its writing
with a halting hand.
Even as I stand over a tiled drain,
I make the water hotter.
That spinal rush.
That warming touch.
Trickle-down drops
and slowed lightning
speak to me of pathways.
Oh, I know
that practice makes perfect.
Must I learn, once again,
what was glossed over
too quickly?
Numbers and Deuteronomy
taught me that details
are not bedeviled.
Now, I pay attention
without training wheels.
I want to hear a snatch
of all the songs ever sung.
The gong of all the bells ever rung.
I want to see, smell, taste
the flowing rains
that have spattered
on the canvas tops of wagons
and the oaken decks of rolling ships.
Please give me but a while longer
before we lay our last.
I cry inside.
I see the sky
in robin’s egg blue.
Things of old
have turned to gold,
unglittering.
An alchemy,
an accretion,
to life’s masterpiece.
I fear I’m being asked
to sign my name.
There are nodding heads,
prayerful hands.
But, layered sheets of sleep
settle upon me.
Soon.
Be not offended
If I don’t remember what you told me.
Or if I tell you something for the second or third time.
I need a good defragging,
And, now that we are all homebodies,
It’s excusable to forget what day it is.
The names we pin,
The borders we mark
On borrowed continents.
If you would,
talk some sense into me.
Or,
just talk some sense.
I am in short supply,
you see.
I have broad and muscled shoulders
from clenching the etched-in tension.
A hard head with a coconut brain
to unveil the dumb mornings.
Those that move in this captivity
are bound to me,
but we are foreign
to one another.
Aremyfeetofftheground 