Leaving Taichung Station

february, stars falling 

et in Arcadia ego

February, stars falling like pieces of clay, blackened

liquorice from a child’s mouth staining thumbs and ground

from the wreckage and the anchorage and the divestment and the undigging and uncovering of life, there lay 

veins of richness that if a pick and axe were put to the test, an albatross bone would yield 

something richer and whose thin erudite simplifies, all the prizes in the world

the weight on the scale of that child’s palm, turned up

The bloom enfolding itself

and that discovery the lantern in the shelled kindergarten, men’s excesses and glamour, their rotunda of sadness,

difficulty and bus marks in the frozen snow a pattern of danced loss, mechanized

and though that may not heal 

all the words and wounds, 

it is all we have, all 

that which conjure and makes up the tales and twists of life’s braidt

is in that digging that celebratory incantation

try to pitch and uncover this and of that which once was, has become and will 

Be, the child laying thee

to padder through, inch by inch, the shoes in the dirt beneath the swing excavating

Movement, her power 

Where is the wisdom if not in that and all that it is teaching us

the instant scales and what tortoise creeks, sew together

Sew together the resting of sensible shirt left in the back of the room, sweatered

The brick of all of that, and onward.....

The child’s guitar size remain the frame of her chest and our bodies swell, our hearts shrink, our shadows engorge, a heart-rich voice , the giggle of the river below the torn bridge, the blood in the seating breath escaping from life, the key scratched in the tin doors, the melody of this land, stuck in the mud of them men

give me pat over ping, heart perpetual

And the sky above us all, outward and breaking

The child’s  finger nails the color painted of my heart. Browned by clay and earth. A crimson 3/4 moon ballooning

Pigeons winging in your heart

And the sky now below us, outward and breaking

All those lives, all those stars, gone and spinning and 

Her jawline like the edge of a nations cicada twirl, banking over an inviting turquoise sea, wayward

the light in the shadow of the bucket the child is swinging as a friend

As she scampers home, the snow-dust macadam, 5 dancing minows in the bottom, eyebrows twiling in the pale the child caught the morning of, 

the line from your jaw to the thread of my heart

and the sky above, and the stars falling, light perpetual 

All those lives,  those stars

all