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pay attention as the fire dies low sinks capsizing
into its crisp whimpered embers and night hovers a downside-up invisible angel expecting something of you. it is time; you've been anointed with flame your plebian excuses all gone scurrying off or flown. tonight you've wrestled up all the stones sinkers you stuffed in your pockets for the last year and some you've been schlepping around so long so precious so familiar as familiar as would your own bone broken and protruding through your thigh. too many to hurl off into one night to be held by one night and its pushpins of stars. god knows with them you could build a staircase to Mars or worse places. god knows you'll die wearing them like toy-capsule vending machine trinkets or shrunken heads and the weight will draw down your sad flesh to the iron-bound Earth's core. enough with this futility-- surrender takes many forms, its least angel the major league pitcher whose ballpark busting throw you aspire to so much. Monet painted sweetly in the heft of his quickening blindness bluesmen carved music from lead-strung instruments chain-balled to the grave and a thousand lousy drunks have been medaled & made love to for poems less sincere than this one. even the perfect airbrushed gods are half-jackass (they who made us in their own image out of monkeys). we carry what we carry until, simply, we no longer carry it or no longer are. in the mean time you're allowed-- a jot against the stone-sinewed age of this cornucopia earth whose sun will burn and burn and fail and die too someday--it's about balancing the fulcrumed weight on the task of shadow sculpting slick with hands of shadow, the careful drawing down and down sheets of tender light against your hunchback silhouette until and until and again and again you see and see against the dying fires forged and spent: the shape of your own wings. a flock of owls followed me
out of my childhood last night almost caught me with their cruel blunt beaks and crueler loneliness came out of the trees like sheets of paper torn from a dismembered diary burned me down to the knees with their yellowed stare. words are not enough to describe how it feels to be driven out of shape, into prey nothing but the battered heartbeat for company back hunched from a 40 year cringe & ahead the empty house in a dead orchard the house I will die alone in a mattress waits linened in the broken glass of a hundred windows through which the breeze sweeps in the soundless wings. Wood frogs beneath the floodplain
lie leaf-litter frozen hard as ingots still and still so tight and hard the silver maple buds you could nail one through a plank while softshell turtles asleep as stones have paved the river's muddy bed for months still living? or breathless-dead? you ask it's all attitude, what you think and how you think it, a glass filled by half or just half emptied is this love so sadly stripped away by steely ice and clawing wind a sleeping seed or a cold dead stone-- you choose: do nothing or love this world and all that's living take that frozen frog that is your heart and blow on it like an alchemist bent on turning hopeless lead to burning gold. I tinder-gather the winter's dark variables
its struggling math and parentheses of ice. the equations no longer suit me nothing will satisfy me now but the spare zero of bare flesh. it's no longer about letting go the calculus I did not learn and may never. it's about sudden erasure, the bone-crack of ice-out unexpectedly on the Merrimack overnight seaward swept; the materialization of birds, songs truce-shattering the wind-walled and pacified silences; the way a fresh sword of grass cuts through all tallying thoughts as a lover's tongue slides through once-gated lips sudden parted. if there is a time to burn things that make sense, that time has arrived. if there shall be an altar to unpredictability, nest that holocaust in my heart. make me stop making the sense that winter humiliated from me. let break the slate, let it lie broken let shoes be discarded and the busted black shards walked barefoot. with the impending sun as my witness, I swear and swear again I am standing on holy ground with all ten fingers useless. if it is true
that all is an illusion and even matter is a waltz of tiny fires, waves of light then why can’t it be true that the dragonfly stitches tight the lips of the dead so they will not speak secrets of that other world woven of stars that the living must not know of and the loons who we think fly south led by bits of magnetite sunk in their whistling skulls really sail on endlessly passing from galaxy to galaxy lamenting in their lonely way the extinction of mysteries while beneath the waves the starfish armed like hands bind this world for us keep it from flying apart in a grip tighter than gravity, more tenacious than love and somewhere in a jungle which is always somewhere other than we can be, the tiger striped in sunrise, wind and black night abrades a path through the trees the sparks of its passage making it possible for us to dream. in my life without a lover
throughout my house kisses move like blind hummingbirds windows rattle and complain my hands linger on vases the necks of wine bottles, doorless doorways I inhabit my furniture despairingly the way an animal inhabits a zoo and cry over small things dead moths, broken yolks, sad clouds. outside, the world goes on and on painting itself tangerines while I dissolve in my shower raise myself from the endless floors and wait for night, sweet night to climb into my bed out of pity. 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. |
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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