Oxen of the Sun
“We are made of time. We are its feet and its voice.”—Eduardo Galeano
1.
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
2.
words, like small billows under hull, tiller the jib of meandering thoughts, pictures, wisps of exhalation, rudder the carriage of our body’s hinting, always worked both, rhyme and flap, to set my life’s navigation right—Ballast of Boom and Keel—the steerage from which you have tried to helm away home, a halyard in its pulling
and then
3.
your life tenses as the music between the joints, the forest in the throat of a wolf, long ago wintered from wind, the color of lost bodies in the estuary of your eyes
do you not taste the silhouette wading far into the sea,
shore break and loss, as each go away, even in the dark recesses of the bramble and cave, light spiders in and allows the moon to thread a silver'd path, outward your limbs breathing while you carve constellations into the chest of the sky and there you are
waking
the forgiveness in the grass, the grace of the bark in the old Oak solitary on the hill, listen to its languor the language of the skate, the vowels of the sole once lost in the wilds of Dover as your heart broke beneath the branches and flight-call of Queens Wood
and the vowels slip and the tenderness of the stars fall away
