“So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go, first be reconciled to your brother or sister…” – St. Matthew’s Gospel

* * * * *

There they sit, back to back

shoulders slumped in denial

of the frozen but not dead.

A light-year stalemate

mocks the freshness

of stolen stares

and words, a little too free.

Mouths, sealed from the inside

like jail-cell bars and chicken wire

remain closed to avoid

rusty words unfit

for newly rustling souls.

Sing the familiar songs

but not too loudly

lest the wind drown out

the blurry shape

of growing melodies.

Coax the buds of festive fare

bloated and waiting,

waiting to return

green for their grey.

Straw horses and gravel roads

offer their backs to lost

and awkward travel companions,

now, once again, stepping lightly

on sure stones.

Murky headwaters, streams too brave to sit still.

A fish moves heavily, drunk on taunts of demise.

Today, there is taste to the line-worm.

Lacerated horizon the quicker meal.

Blackout, shrugged-shoulder

dangers buried in clay pots; a potency

of Providence-offered sight in

a living room of thought. 

Patrolling unwelcome proximity between

competing aches of shame and loneliness.

Chance builds a bridge.

Love (is it?) fords a stream.

Choice, rushing, floats the river, watching.

Welcome mat at the door of happy reconnaissance(?)

No. Too frail,

unrecognizable against blood-iron door

loosed on hinges of an un-frantic passion –

(the only love worth loving).

Denouement of false desire wrapped tightly

in iron embrace; kiss of an angel king.

Then, when dust drinks rain, at least

it will know it can.

when the vein constricts just to hear

the blood

and your eyes see only in

the cave of night

when fixtures of time break from the rhythms of ground

only then

when the slow draft of deepest thirst is denied

and uneven steps abandon the road       

you clutch your own chest and your fingerprints

don’t recognize you

only then

when birds birthing songs are halted by wind

their silent haloes of pain embed in dark corners

and hope is cued but misses curtain call 

only then

when all this crescendoing chaos crows too loud

and reveals itself tripping over its own demise

then delight and devastation trade places

the Wind reminds the rain of its purpose

a Face turns toward you and

then

becomes

now

When muscle, bone, and sinew can’t find heart

and listening and looking. Then, severed in time

from the wishing well of wonder, we wander

through rushes and slivers of our moments, bent

over mirrored water, haunted.

There is a wrinkle in the hour’d fabric of

our days when tender grows the minstrel’s

song. It rings across golden fields of

shimmering wheat – milled hopes, rolled and real.

Bardic but breathless it sounds, reveling in tremors

of songs still sung to handmade candles.

They shine to our hopes, ablaze with just

a hint of what could be.

There is a certain moment, beholden to itself,

in which ghosts and gazes meet to discuss

their future. Still, birthed

from the ashes of forgottenness

an ember yet lurks, small but waiting, patient –

alert to any movement or sounds of humming.

Catch it if it sings.

Beautiful illusion, this 

trying to juggle fire –

trading one ache for another.

Sun and moon withhold their light

and spend their time drinking instead.

Shoulders, steady and strong,

but cold, are small consolation

against the high-cliff dive

into welcome water.

When do heart and shadow 

walk together? Does one see

the other? Would they dance

if they met?

Centrifugal encounter, the quest

for the peace of another 

that renders only pieces

of another. No eye for eye,

tooth for tooth.

No. I and eye,

and tooth with tooth – grins

hiding smiles

hiding pain.

Beautiful encounter – when

our illusions become too illusory

even for themselves.

And shells crack.

And blood meets light.

_____________

Picture found here

Not everyone who lifts a glass

can do so with hands made

for prayer to the new gods.

The stolen reserves

of forgotten men

and their women of renown

steep in basements and gutters,

and tenements with shuttered windows.

Still, the backward glances

help remind the waffling ones.

It was near ten o’clock before the fellas

found their way to the table

of friends,

of insiders,

of wagging tongues and nodding heads,

of tacit agreement on disagreeables;

of the ancestors.

That’s when the best stories were.

That’s when I saw the words

most intended for song and not

for crouching in little doorways.

What was it you said before

we sat down to drink the air?

Something about

not enough garbage cans in laybys

or those fucking American hamburger joints

stealing from the coffers of your grandfather’s

croft house memories.

One more then, to close the wounds.

I took the long road today.

I scrambled up slow steps of the jagged, upward path-

leading to the thinner air and thicker place,

the craning neck of her yellow crown.

Then, for the first time, I saw.

I saw what others saw,

and failed to see.

And wouldn’t see.

I saw the rest.

And it was good,

so good that I came back down.