Friday, January 6, 2012

Before I Mount The Gallows

One consents to wreckage, a sentence comprised of penitential reflection. As light can be seen through the delicate flesh of a mouseling's ear. Not play, not singing. We stopped where the statues were dusted with snow, seeking lines that would beget poems that honored the ancestral impulse. Certain relatives are buried in unmarked graves.

Yet morning does come and one rises and begins again to compose the twenty sentences. We are only partially what we eat and partially what we feed to others. A pile of rocks, stubble pines, glints of sunlight warming nothing. So nobody listens, so what? He carried the trapped mouse out into the morning dark and let it go near the chicken shed.

Ah, but that was another story, one we told to help people fall asleep in difficult times. Drinking coffee outside Worcester, reminiscing about nicotine. Would you hold me a last time before I mount the gallows and sail off in pursuit of the old dog? Night comes as well and you can't forget that. There were apple trees all over that garden.

I have made a religion of the phrase "and yet." You experience silence as an island first, then you are lifted into a familiar song. There is no such thing as here and there. One returns to be broken, one longs again for that forbidden kiss. You know, don't you?

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