The sky takes its time to make its case, streaks about the atmosphere, gray swathes of condensation and the all but gone slip of moon. The foundation shifts and cracks, a temporary face to slow the bardo witnessed, the transitory always traveling in waves and breaks. The thumb bluntly breaks the frame, more evidence between the landed lead and scattered brass, the placement of the markers as the moments fade. We stare out from among the words and twitter, our song dependent upon the feather. The flocked together and the decanted panache. We came late to the party, uninvited, mistaken for someone else’s friend.
There’s a little light with the sun still reaching. There’s a little rain where the sky gave way. It’s always that the words don’t add up laid upon the elder resonances, that there is no speech capacious enough to contain all the all that is. The words do a little dance, the words make a little love, but the get down never comes up. The language of elements becomes the cant of chemistry in the tricky grammar of physics. There’s a lot going on, even when the words say nothing’s up. I write this down, the sky breaks character and begins to rain like it means it. All tell and no show.
There is little left but want and lack. The animal always mostly true, the entity all over the map. It’s my shabby little rituals, the smoke and the weight and the turnings of the earth. It’s these laden repetitions, setting stones and leying lines. The oldest paths woven through, before there were words, when everything was made of oaths. As if everything wasn’t magic, as if the shell game ever stopped, these engines we express. Etched into the skin of oblivion, life builds and burns. These dots and dashes, this blink and gone. This boundless blessing, this stray thread.