(Making Beds)
not a poet not a poem - just
...thought quilts - lots of people collect scraps - scrap metal, bits of cloth, any scrap to fit a scrap book..
members of quilting bees save fabric swatches in bags - my scraps are images, feeling tones,
moments of or from, then hunting past the material world;
the bag proper, is me, i suppose.
writing, i grab at random, a handful, and put them
where they already actually are (together) sutured with scars sometimes, or
sometimes light; threads silky and fine - no matter what, they always
fit so easy.
in me, a wrinkled mess that in graced nano-second flash-inspiration, can be pulled taut,
a fitted sheet - metaphors shift, tumble then settle back towards what is so vast, pointless
and crucial, and so ascendant to a
thinking mind's splicing-ly specific topping and popping off topic-subject-word
one at a time logic is unreal somehow
tidily ugly amidst awestruck speechless everything all at once
don't mind me
or my opinion
i am without drawn conclusion - drawing blanks, snapping open a blanket, smoothing
a bumpy quilt aka comforter - (quite sew, for me) pulled up around my chin, i am not going out there,
risking the divine, to debate or defend, fist on table, heart off-line,
ever again
(Dusting)
i don't believe in ghosts - he said - the dead desert us.
ghosts are among the living. (this to me, sounded so much
like statements of belief - like ghosts he could not see - but i said
nothing). yet even still, his words leave me deserted
and haunted. waking in the grey slivers at dawn's lead edge, to sweet
scented sharp warning: the shape of my mind and this day itself, are awry now and
from now on, strongly influence the shape of the moon,
the moon the moon
so much better than the sun,
taking fierce light head on, to let me
look deep without fear, and wide eyed into its calm
face. meanwhile, the first bird
long before dawn, somewhere between 3 and 2 a.m. folds itself open in and ode to
fractal patterns, reminding me that i am the green breath of a
fallen forest which did make a sound in its falling, regardless of whom did
or did not show up
to hear.
( [yes, she does do] Windows)
imagined absence beating back
illusion's persistence within cause/effect. enormous
moth hung at the window.
i hear only wing shuffle.
a deck of cards played
in a gamble
at light's jawline.
my heart swarms there, held firm against the backdrop of "instead."
(Kitchen - wipe down stovetop, counters, sink)
thin-lidded, weak filter, eyes still feel you
bright on the other side.
a glow - out and far and to
and fro from a cloud front
in backslide.
agile and weightless, thief-like anguish -
a flash temperature i can't
measure against my own skin, making itself
clear as an "is not" is not there to touch, though
it does so touch me. flowing slick, sibilant winter
entrained to the same soul same ol' silence, sown in
an in between that snuck through harvest time less
(Dishes - sink is below a window where she can see a factory)
few words in language, few that hold meaning to coax
unrest towards its fuller form: beauty - she asks much - but so gently, take care not to slip
by her request - an ash flicked off consciousness (like that) a pencil
lead feathered through soft paper, impressed and made right - just write
with greater speed than a hand can
longhand til the page lets loose innocuous flame
- sustaining itself yet unconsumed.
insurgent sensor
ship
in a base fog. the very ground lifts,
disperses, engages speech -
supple yet weak and loose-pivoting round through stifled inventions.
still, the lunar high pulse presses on - the first longing
to make it all last - silenced in and by its own
ineffable outpour it cannot edit or retrieve.
again abandoned again, left behind,
breathlessly leaning into the last breath where, i hope,
my ghost waits
and believes.
