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20 below. stop and the cold
presses Her lips to your fingertips, draws out a little bit of your soul with her teeth. She's been doing this your whole life you realize but here among the winds and their long zeros the hoodooed trees and rime ice stacked like daggers you feel Her at your ear and there are no lies, no trying on your eulogy for fun, no shiteating thumbs up for a camera, it's just you and Her and everything that still matters about your life this world something sweet on your tongue all of the pending kisses waiting for you in another more reasonable place a green blade of grass, a duck slapping wings on open water lovemaking, the soft miracle of a bed and roof the walls of your skin your house & this safe nation you are fortunate to live in, strange how everything becomes possible, beautiful even rubbish, mediocrity in this harrowing down between Being Here and Not Being Here ice-glaze on your goggles breath freezing shut your eyelids the col broomed of its snow by the artistic wind summit glinting like Olympus, too frigid to relieve yourself let alone dance-- the question is not if you will return to earth (for you likely will, you have not come to this world without the necessary talismans, the requisite respect), but rather how far down the mountain you will carry the truth. the storm drops
its star-petaled art, each one landing like the foot of a cat or the fingertip of an angel anointing a sick child. they touch down with geologic patience lock their miniature hands slowly wall us off from this fair earth, erase all the rough edges of things. they are the curtains of summer's last song, death's sound-sapping lullaby. strange now
to think I have lived half a year in the broom swept desert of my own bed have raised myself like a solitary tulip daily have cooked alone, ate from the countertop breathed into the scoured horizons of midnight and winter twining myself around this bear of nothing touching nothing inhabiting nothing restless in this space between skin and bone marrow. strange how it has become me has draped me in its slow arctic amnesia, has kissed me long and indeliberately the kiss that slows the pulse sets one dreaming soon forgotten dreams of spring's green shadows. Sleep now.
Rest your face on Night's faceless sea. Take off the day's briars shed the strangling tie, the straightjacket of scars and blows. Be faceless, bodiless let Night unravel you with Her slow unraveling fingers. The entire day and everything in it exists only to prepare you for Her embrace. I wish I could take your sad
head in both hands and plant it in the ground next to the wildflowers that do not toil or spin and beneath the moon where the night-things move about in their night-clothes of furs rearranging things, reshaping the earth while the human race shuffles along on its blind mission and your head now brown and dirty as a coconut, beautiful as a fat acorn there in the groin-warm earth would take its time under the moon and sun and the stars that mark the little fires of the sky-people who are blessing you, us who are praying to your head there in the earth, who are sending angels in the shape of moths with limited but tender vocabularies each one repeating, Peace to your beautiful face, Peace to your beautiful face. I found one of your
long hairs attached to my jacket six months after the fact after having gone on fused to my own knees carrying this sad head from place to place, helpless as it spoke of wingless birds, towers with no doors, smoldering plane tickets, fires that give off blind light. I resent nothing so I thought, not even the rabid dog of my heart. But this hair yes, I resent it, here in my future where it has no right and yet I lift it not the woodstove or wastebasket but the window and then sleep perchance dream of a bird lining its nest in gold maybe or lining it in fire. this poem
is to say goodnight as you are carried through the wall of sleep to where the owl zips himself into his tuxedo of sculptured air the coyote unpacks her symphony of bent flutes and the pirate moon fits its horn to dredge the treetops. here, too, you ready yourself: naked as an apple prepare, perhaps by keying a secret sequence of stars; by launching a kiss in a paper boat; or by whispering, now before it is too late one thing more than your breath or survival that gives you the right to say "I was alive." enough! stop your counting; the manyfaced moon is still widening her lovely chin to you and away; the sea still stretches toward the shore with long kind arms as if to offer something you barely recall having lost then withdrawing; and the birds, which winter has gouged out of autumn's piñata will return to lift your sagging heart on antiphonic strings only to abandon you to deafness. this happens every year; everything happens every year, but don't be blinded by time and its iron numerals. there are no beginnings or endings, no lines or cardinal directions, and clocks—those desperate inventions, symbols for madness in worlds kinder than this one—can't be trusted; a caterpillar does not become a butterfly, it is born a bud blossoming into wings, a collage of thoughts aching into a love story, a tongue scrolling out into a future tuliped kiss. you, too are not a collection of resolutions, thresholds: you are the thing itself happening to itself, the sea in mudrā unfurled on the shore like a collapsing child then rising to catch the sun like a ball again, again lifting the flaming ball high drawing it westerly into the sea, again like so, like so! it is true, lover: the universe adores the whoosh of breath the whump of heartbeat but no one stops to count such things without being turned from the path and burned then drowned. |
Poetry LogPoems are posted here when I'm ready to share them. I often don't title my poems. The date you see above the poem may be the date it was posted here and not necessarily the date it was created. To see more, click on the Archives below. Archives
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Unless otherwise noted, all content ©Paul-William Gagnon, Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs license.
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