Two Trees: flags for sunrise
Even in the dark recesses of bramble and cave, light spiders in
and allows the moon to thread a silver'd path,
outward.
So, there you are.
I
Faces gather time along their edges, sprockets of light pitched around thumb-bowed shadows, the way milk rims the lip and bottom-dip of a glass, the way bone sediments sentiment pitched from the age and voice of the earth, the way glass and stone color from exposure. We speak of time, we speak of faces, we seldom speak of the cauterized and coalesced into some odd unknowing. How is it that we distinguish one face from all the others?
How is it that we speak of others and ourselves through an algebra of memory or of the faces that we have seen or known distinguished into certainty? What else is there in our knowing, at the heart of the well of our remembrance?
An algebra of memories.
II
And the years slip like breath along the edges of our skin, an abundance and a reckoning, the firmament spreads wide, like a gap-toothed space, dark and unending. Pitch and Pale above, all that which twined and coursed through you, comes forth like small accumulations.
And then.
setting our hearts,
flags at sunrise,
the body burnished by the choral of teeth, ice and wave(s)
and all the double-dutch, dice-rolling bones,
that coining, that coming and you there in the corner window dipping:
swelter the light that spiders across the lip-upcoming and the knot turn:
you guarding and going:
switch'd
the tree bent like the pouring of tea,
your heart most magnificent, buckling,
sighting for miles, round miles.
the large victories meaningless of taste, the smaller
disappointments inked forever on the tongue,
as the mind reels
this need for electric fingering; the heart’s luminous touch; the imagination’s space and scampering,
in and of this world, and occasionally
not.
III
And the body flagging fresh and vital, nutrient of light.
Tonight, with our head tethered by ache and slightly addled,
Shortcomings as a plate of eels prepared for a wok,
how should we prepare and savor not forsaken.
And we alighted.
The cooking and the reckoning of disappearance.
To toss something out, gone and waving, these rhymes
The fed, the alchemy of losing, some terminal imbalanced art:
our governance.
Dangerous scurries working magic,
Our life yesterday and the world’s openings
The secret of magical beasts
The poetry of the unheard breath:
Two women turning show tunes into ecstatic jazz, where ice crackles in a glass
Run blue.
We reconcile the beauty and the sorrow of the moment when we dance with the dead and sit down to eat, and later make it back home even more replenished. Where the eyes trail,
The heart follows.
IV
Loved stirred as recipe, history written by slaves, plantation bound, kitchen caught or freed. Can you recognize the shadows of the voice in the hand-written stories: recipes as our truest voice and poetry
for we feed one another as story,
we hand down recipes to retell stories of joy and pain
and the Sun bleeds into the beating chest of you.
This final night, and off the sky is flight bound
And then,
The setting of hearts.
Flags at sunrise.
