Rising of the Lights, 98
And slow the stories alight upon all the tongues of our verbs
And wayward adjectives and simple algebra
And yet we gain flight, no matter how cracked and cold.
Accordingly,
There we go bruising and aloft.
Iron bent like the curve of a vowel that has grown old, sat long like cupped rain
Over the shoulders of strangers who have failed to catch the soft sound of the coffin
Of the word that has pinched, wrought and run relief.
And there we go, again,
Carry like small thimbles of cinnamon the pollen dust of the land though which you have Journeyed
Of that which has been left behind, sprinkled shells of memory planted into the armour
Of the trees like shelled cicadas,
Wet tin cans of voice tossed into the ocean at night,
Amounting to our seating selves torn slightly and untended
Among the caverns and valleys and underpasses of cities,
Clipped away parts of our salted skin, songs and sights packed up by others.
Is this not your landscape?
The rural hills and shadows of that dusty borderland overlooking the skeleton of the Rio Grande,
The urban alleys and knobs you drummed along, transfigured by the tomtoms of your song,
By and of you.
The small dry snap, not twig, not stone, not mineral but the bone of your affinity.
Can you hear it in your passing, now ghosting along the cool desert night.
You the earth and the sky and all that came from inside.
That essential and real El Paso: the bloom scattered along and inside the spine and stone of Sky The quick of the land and bobbing of the sea that your father once had tried to teach you.
This curvature that fit among your vertebrae like a knot bowed around a letter unsent.
Bowsprit and halyard. Tuck and tang--Tanging.
This does not end, the jawing and the mending.
This does not end.
All That, all that. Past the window, where we hadn’t listened sharp enough to the sound of the Wind that bespoke of your nocturnal parsing from which we later learned of your passing
When circumstance leapt at you and left us scattered and anguished and the falling.
Gambolled out into the wide raft of things you had conjured of the living, bewildered and cast. How could we not known all along.
And then of faith, the jawing and the mending
Of our beginning from which we were torn, the stroke and the strap of motion.
Your heart outer-sized, our own the weight of a coin in our palm,
Yet we amend from the gossamer map of things, your life, our memories, your meaning
And from the distance, the climb of our imagination, comes a mending.
Brave yourself
And scatter wide that which you have stitched and from which you became
Scalped from all these ordinary things, yet whole from their reconfiguration
And your life’s lesson.
And the singing
For: Chester Woodward (1956 – 2019)
