Considerations
Consider, O Lord, how You sit atop the sky; like a man
in a glass bottom boat.
Consider sky elsewhere; worn thin as a mattress.
Consider the women, marbling
in their corners
the men with tongues of bronze; how
you tool the silence around them.
Consider the rolling wheel of Spring
the Summer, a haunt of blue;
How the rivers roll up like prayer mats.
Consider my Lover;
the yellow church of his skin, the clean
wells of his ears;
How the notes of a song come to him
like birds descending
on a power line; How
in his absence I am of two throats
each of them cramped.
~
Consider, O Lover, my throat
white as cigarette paper.
The crushed lavender of my knuckles.
My heart, a dulled needle threaded through
too many patterns.
Lover, they were stitches of pain
you undid me of;
There is blood gone rancid in me you can not move.
But how we comb and comb the night for jewels
to stack
around one another,
to cast in the mold of our love.
That dandy, the sky, enters blue-suited
sun like a scotch in hand
as I consider the brevity of a lion;
How many flies can touch at decay.
Consider the road, long
and forked as the Devil’s own tongue.
Consider the Devil, burning every bridge;
Placing
in every tree a black
bird. In every bird a black thought.
~
Consider, O Devil, how these thoughts
will darken the map.
How the desert ants clean the sand from their legs.
How the women will cluster;
held together by some vine of gossip, souring like grapes.
Consider Autumn; its many whispered undoings.
Its cousin, the Wind,
agitating all.
And Winter, like the ruin
of some river.
The clock leaves the wall, lights on
my shoulder to peck out
the time, and my bones
can trace their longest name to the ground.
Posted 10/23/11