Returning After, a French Meal
The sky seams an exact fit to the alphabet of the steps
a solitary figure giraffes toward a distempered porch,
his posture a softened exclamation point,
his walk and recitation relearned in an up-tempo skip
when in the light cloven figures seemingly burst, suddenly
dark drapes scribble off black notes casually on the sky,
a musical score upon a downed dead wire
alone a single bat recumbent along the line of abracadabra,
a wayward letter dropped from the length of a word,
a dogeared page from the scattering sky
the physics of light meant to form and deform the creature V
shorn from its preceding vowel and sibling brush stroke:
neither mammal nor structured thought nor abacus of sound—
the flapping upward recalls his walk homeward the lambent night.
a day ago and the word it conveys to him now—
soundless as beast zips its way toward some long lone dropping,
as she was dropped into the grave and lacquer coffin.
The evening later off-slipping, the wings’ grammar adrift,
the evidentiary thought or a kite upending,
his solitary glide, the space left opened, and whatever recipe one invents:
the lungs of the land left standing skeletal
the sound of things falling--
the plane's rev'd up backwarding, the glass sprinkling in its drop scattering toward-the-concrete misstep,
the malaprop drips like a spool,
memories gone misremembered, the katabasis of the awkward turn,
the plummeting toward the dandelion, the re-arrange'd bee swatted,
the puzzled shell shucked,
you that slipped away, a kaleidoscope braid:
don't throw your hands up, constellation over consternation, just yet,
the small blip in the radar and the blue swirl above the hood
the you inside the me left behind,
the invincible summer seeded in the thorny stems found on the side walk of February, aflex
as she was dropped into the grave and lacquer coffin
With love comes strange currencies,
though he comes toward another hard-hurt, he thinks
the scattering dust mites raftering a bridge with the twilight, ajoist'd.
and he watches the bat go swinking away from the rest of the cloaked colony
and his heart recognizes that decisive turn, away
as she was dropped into the grave and lacquer coffin.
Remember that pivot, she once wrote,
the hinge more than the syllables you were fed or the stories long and lean you once kept.
