How We Imagine Ourselves, anew
“…because silence and ash are straight paths…"--Mircea Cărtărescu
Through mirrors and ink
flat muscled and honey tint
the long tide in his eye, a silver hush-hush in her ear
a loom secreting a torn thread shuttlecocked between
toe and toe and tongue to tongue
the food fingered in scoops
their hearts light as grass,
light lanterned and incontestable, their lives passed
the flight around your mouth, a cosmos
the memoir along your spine, a tributary
how we imagined ourselves, renewed
the expanse of syntax and its salvaging dredged up from the muck
to shape the unshakeable silence
death reveals itself in the hood of its shadow
pilgrims penitent in their searching, we
the lent light of the loss of things, voiceless
somnambulant lives, the threading that came before the palimpsest
memory epigenetic in the family tree’s notebook
the digging spirited them, forward
gossamer in their limbs, scribbled in the searching
the grief forever in the gaps bearing the frocks, underneath your heart unfurled
brief how we imagine ourselves, anew
illuminated in a draw a parchment and a name
between the home and the hive
the prosperity and the diminishing
on the back of the wall the graffiti we drew from a forlorn lipstick canister
remember
when a single word was washed in rye
charnels above and the constellation of erased notes, below
the grammar and the forgetting and the kisses on the interstate
the dew on the windshield in the April morning traced by her finger
once our lives’ soiled with a single knuckle and a swipe, gone
love letters leaned into the long distance lingering between our lips
language swept up from the gutter and cornered behind the barbed wire
awakened, the lanterns pressed hard against the children’s chests
one day your illusions walked out the door and breath arrested, at 90 bpm
the murmur in the garden dug up with a rusty green spanner
the dress hung up in the kudzu by wind and wire
lives kited far, away ran our love in the stone bed of the field
you two held one another in the rising flood waters as a roof ran past burbling
in the night you drew an amphitheater of tin rhyme and reason in the moonlight
the rivers collapsed the beaver damns
alluvial soil moved in the darkness under a stagnant moon
your stories and hearts rang out like a chartreuse glass jar sharded under boot
beneath our feet, the tide turned dark and life barked white
and we turned toward Calypso
generations met over grave and gravel, our blocks of named stone
he turned east and she appeared west in the ebbing light
they penciled the book of love from the alphabet of affliction and cartilage
along the red clay road bird song ran
silence lead to the path in the woods,
memory bloomed as ash and the dust touched milkweed
life altered the somber river, you the gateway ringing.
For: Jack Burman, a friend and extraordinary artist
