From
the still wet iron of
my fire
escape’s top
railing a truth is making this instant on our clock
open with a taut
unchirping un-
breaking note – a perfectly
released vowel travelling
the high branches across the way, between us and the
others, in their
apartments, and fog
lifting for sun before evaporation
begins. Someone
is born
somewhere
now. The
planet
suspends
like a streetlight
at night
in the quiet
galaxy.
Endurance
continues to be the secret of the tilled
ground we make
breath by breath. What
seed dear
lord are we we
think as we toss more of our living out
into the turning and turning,
our personal
dead cast always deeper into
the general dead
no matter how hard you try
to keep your
own your
known own – and gnarled remembering mossing over –
the tenderness a characteristic trait
elicits, the very thing you
hated, rising to make
you almost unable to
speak –
– where are you? – the fields beyond the housing tract
still accepting the rain
as these asphalted ones we’ve
sealed
cannot – so yes, look close, this right word on my railing
who knows no hate
no love
you can count on it,
no wrenching strangling guilt, no wish so terrible
one had said
otherwise just once in
time –
between one life and another what is it that
can really
exist – oh
nothing says this
awakeness – and look, you
who might not believe this because
you are not seeing it with your own
eyes: look:
this light
is moving
across that flower on
my sill
at this exact
speed – right now – right here – now it is gone – yet go back up
five lines it is
still there I can’t
go back, it’s
gone,
but you –
what is it you are
seeing – see it again – a yellow
daisy, the sun
strafing the petals once
across, and the yellow, which could be a god why not,
pulling itself up
out of
shadow – so
silent –
and the patch of sunlight
moves – and each word said in
time after this is
the subtraction we call
life-lived – this gold its centre – and beyond it, still on
the rail, this
bird, a
secret gift to
me by the
visible –
of which few in a life are
given – and how
when it opens its
yellow beak in the glint-sun to
let out song, it
lets out the note on a plume of
steam,
lets out the
visible heat of its
inwardness
carrying a note – a note in
a mist – a note-
breath, breath-
note – oh
cold spring – the white
plume the size of a
bird rises up with its own
tail,
feathering-out in
the directions,
carrying the next and the next-on
note, until the whole
shape of the
song is wisped-
up and
suddenly
it shuts, the source
shuts, the form
complete, the breath-bird
free to
rise away into the young day and
not be –
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