High Mist Toward Noon

Instituted at the desk but not yet overcome
by the banality at the end of imagination, you ask
the page: will all tongues
run dry? You’re invested personally.

A light so trumpetlike in its tone knuckles the breeze,
              but it’s a blue world no matter how brassed. Whole books
              are left undigested, while the telephone maintains its place
              as the object of every preposition.

The down on an arm can, however, on occasion, stand on end,
as if your skin sensed an open field behind the bursting silence.
There the wild globe perspires in its desire to overcome the limits
of your landscape, like something endangered and alive slinking
away from the tiled agenda of a roadside restroom. Your eye
now unimpressed by donuts and funnel cakes finds a stellar
sequence of moons rising through the pines above a morning.

When back in your office you see a kid grate his teeth against
a sentence hollowing through the static of the intercom, you inform
the clerk in a short-sleeve shirt that the time has come:
you must rearrange your life. You command him to cuff you and 
in a set of disposable restraints, you become a saint, arrested and 
arresting. Your eyes full of suffering turn to the ceiling tiles, through
which your gaze pierces to a beyond of copper wires
in vinyl casings—yellow, green, and blue—linking you to every terrestrial
being above and below your floor,

                an elevator of voices,

                                                an orphic infinity.

From The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom. Copyright © 2019 by Magdalena Zurawski. Used with permission of the author and Wave Books.