Song for Tinderbox
“...may we not be strangers in the lush province of joy”― Charles Wright
I
We are born with phosphorous in our throats:
Scrimshawed on our bones
From the moment air set flame to our lungs
As our tongues approached voice and met the first crack of light,
The combustion of soul allowed,
Once the opening of our mother’s womb had been breached
Our son the click of tin against wood
The langue and league of life
A child’s first sentence swells as a song for a tinderbox and arced into light.
Do you celebrate this sound on the anniversary of your birth?
Open your eyes and tear the night down
II
Uncover yourself an instrument and caress it with a match
Or the knowledge of your fingertips passed
Your heart a disease of incandescence
The voice a dictionary of incendiary truths.
Listen to the eruption of the match bead struck singularly
This fable of your life—
Geography still long stained on your fingers
From a worn map veined colorful by countries and silhouetted by dreams.
Taste the ink married to your tongue
The kindred fruit epicurean of your touch
Even after it has passed through warm rivers and memory.
Do you celebrate this sound on the anniversary of your birth?
In the light, there is always strength stringing from the shadows.
III
You were born applied by this calculus
Savor it, as the warmth of a palm teaching you skin its alphabet
As the brush of wind lingers through the spine of a tree,
While the cicada’s shell falls like your mother’s hair into your small, tender hairs,
As you ran laughing through summer’s breeze.
So too your name,
The hymn scratched on air and set later by machine and ink pressed to page
Do you celebrate this sound on the anniversary of your birth?
What once flowered, spread wide petal by petal as a kite in the green air, survives
the dragon’s dragging the sky behind.
IV
Between the editing of soft blue rain on the anniversary of your birth,
Allow the moment its agile grace
And the glycerin in your throat to pass, almost absent, as a kiss
The belly of a dropped pouches of rain attaches itself to your heart
Like candled sleep, the punch in the night
To even the lightest fragility of the country of a face, forgotten.
Do you celebrate this sound on the anniversary of your birth?
The untangled tangled knot of the taste left inside you after her tooth marks
As meteoritic trace.
A fingered tinderbox left small explosions along your spine,
The more permanent tattoo
Charting an adagio rondo pattern —given your ineffable place.
Your ineffable name
Celebrate this carving on your anniversary,
When life entered you and born up each of us from your spreading
Warmed by others’ lyric caressed slowly and ballooned from recognition
Forgiven as the wine banned from that inherited place of tomb and temple
Ripening.
Do you celebrate this sound on the anniversary of your birth?
V
The ghost scribbling songs in the back of your heart and throat
Rivering through death toward life in the blink of an eye.
Do you celebrate this, ever?
for: Dima, Brandon and Nate Black
