Fence of Sticks (audio only)
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The wind blows through the doors of my heart. It scatters my sheet music that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys. Now the notes stripped, black butterflies, flattened against the screens. The wind through my heart blows all my candles out. In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy. From the mantle smashes birds' nests, teacups full of stars as the wind winds round, a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows or is blown through the rooms of my heart that shatters the windows, rakes the bedsheets as though someone had just made love.
2010
See how the first dark takes the city in its arms and carries it into what yesterday we called the future. O, the dying are such acrobats. Here you must take a boat from one day to the next, or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand. But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening, diving, recovering, balancing the air. Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings, wind from revolving doors or currents off the river. Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher. Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
2004
Ponds are spring-fed, lakes run off rivers. Here souls pass, not one deified, and sometimes this is terrible to know three floors below the street, where light drinks the world, siphoned like music through portals. How fed, that dark, the octaves framed faceless. A memory of water. The trees more beautiful not themselves. Souls who have passed here, tired, brightening. Dumpsters of linen, empty gurneys along corridors to parking garages. Who wonders, is it morning? Who washes these blankets? Can I not be the greeter of souls? What's to be done with the envelopes of hair?
2004