Penumbra: in the shadow of song and vaccines
“Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home…”-Szymborska
Prologue
Of shadows calendared like your tick tok rhyming and moving and hoping:
Breath cantilevered like heart-strings,
What else is possible during this time, what else is able, is muscular and organ-made,
If not everything: stitch and lengthened,
This beloved. This our time. This we. This you.
This.
I
Once I learned to cook wearing white, bare and crisp as shells,
The broken eggs, half crescents of an eye gone blind,
This wobbled time, this blind moment for us all,
Softened and weightless, baking towards the weight of flour against the undercarriage of your fingers, Slick and inching the yoke and temperature against my chin,--your tenderness--
As I wiped away my fear, the outer-skin that was my seal-skin:
My mother’s apron, your abracadabra, your fear and your strength,
So that now I cannot make a damn thing or even crack an egg,
Without the stains and the apron’s remains and small tatters--
An ocean away.
All these moments jumping before the shadows of this broken year,
Before we pegged upon a wall that was seven times zones away
A lifetime away, away.
Can you vaccinate against hope
II
A rose that drives in the lights is a forlorn beast
A crippled animal cat in the tar-pit of time.
Two roses that drive in the parched light,
Instead re-create the entire museum of dinosaur’s lives
Fossils peering breathed life into our imagination, excavated in front of a sun
Chiseled upon our departments, until those two head-buddings suggest not rose, not bone
But you and I
Scrotum and skin, urethras and wearying
Vas Deferens and vesicles,
Rap and rhyme, toe and tap
Our lungs inhabited and chewed upon
Of all that which rosed away and is this:
Shell and sand but more, the all of that, the all of we,
The all: gone the racing of the broken health.
Should we speak of these things?
Should we speak, at all?
III
Bike shadow, tin and gin, and time,
How does such a weight that cannot be sat upon a seal,,
How does one weight, the deflation of things, absent itself
But still outlined in the penumbra along the gate
Your fingers tonguing the garage wall in fear:
My heart the weight of a bicycle seat, lifted and forgiven.
Buckle that in your grasp.
IV
Do you seek, this diseased time and its chafing. In the dust of things, right there,
Pampered corner still, which manager to carry you so far, so far and
Against the wall and alive.
V
We leap over the lawn’s sprinker,
Toward the light of the cascading wet,
Against that which we have forgotten in this time of loss,
Against the Spring’s fulsome blue sky and green-ground song.
And once:
You who were laid bare to despair—
Are we were yet, there…
We are not yet,
There.
VI
The smile of clean light and oxygen racing.
The ache as we, each of us, prances toward light and the outstanding view.
Who would have known,
Clip and clacking—
We are nothing if not attending, if not attending the words
If not each of us and all that may be lost if,
If not then and if not this,
Parry this, you.
You.
Vaccinate that.
Celebrate that.
Alive. Arrested. Awakened.
VII
Peal away,
Peal away the layers of self, like wallpaper removed lovingly,
Our skin after an afternoon in the sun touched by aloe,
Our memory reinventing...
I name this love:
And there we go, collected and collective: collecting
Pondering the palimpsest of our new life,
Mylar shadow of our former
Our hearts, waving as if prayer flags stirring gently colours in the breeze
penumbra: in the shadow of song and vaccines
Conclusion:
You.
What else, if not,
You.
What else.
Race toward the sun, race toward the all that is, still,
You, alas.
But May beckons and gallops in next and
The heart is a bloom
Today.
Oh you,
there we are are,
filled by this time:
breath.
oh, you,
breathe.
