Preamble to Forever
Some blood still in it. Some yeast to make bread from a body;
some bones not quite ground down enough to swallow. Still,
some solace when the mice chew through the rafters & open
the sky to our song. Sometimes it is like this. Veined with light,
a white clapboard church choked in vines & your parents
somewhere in it doing whatever the dead do to stay lit. Some
things will be just where you left them. When you come back,
the same mountain mined beyond repair & the same lack
of children in the park. Just dogs. Concrete. The sky still gives little slack. Those
old paper prayers from childhood snagged on
the same branches. Same birds with all the flight knocked out
still struggling to ascend. Wings like tiny windows open & close.
* * * * *
Clearcut
Water as it cuts
through whiskey.
Add an aspirin uncoiling.
Its contrails. Skyless.
An old man coughs bright
red stars into an oil rag.
The last time I saw him my grandfather was a winter
bird filled with panic & thirst.
Cold, distant, raging sun.
His son in the earth in a state
that could hardly be farther from home.
Those prayers he used to terrify me with
drowned in a train whistle, though no one’s
seen service here in decades.
I want to say all this is true. That spit & shake means an oath
fulfilled. That lost things find their way back to us
eventually.
But now the narrow corridor
of his body. Barely shoulder-width.
Lungs, a ghost town. All its industry
spent.
Like coming up for air, he’d say. Each breath.
Like measuring your life in fallen forests. Because each part
is heavier than the whole
& the whole is so damn heavy.
Nicotine-brown fingertips.
Failing eyes. Learning at last
to listen with our hands.
Now a crust of candlelight.
Song. & song. Its scar.