A particular bird in blur this morning. A particular consideration in my feeling of a color in the flexion of an exalted song. Some say it’s enough. These notations extracted from the afterlife. Arranged from fricatives & fictions, diadems & difference. Winter falling from the leaves, & not a question of power. One thing that flares into two. Two that is swiftly three. They dissolve the sense through acts of sensation, suddenness in seedheads. Through my window, glistening off the eaves, the shadow of a sparrow is neither “in” nor “out.” Do they know it is going to snow, it was snowing all afternoon while it was purpling under my eyes, while the old songs were in transit, while laws were being chambered, while poets sutured the soldiers, while maples broadcasted the latest deaths in color, some distant, some linear, some pointillistic, some raking gutters — What does it say? Whatever the eye takes in. The price of milk. The price of gas. Ecstatic variations on sameness vibrating in a sun -wrapped skull. It says, “there is no amphitheater grander than your din -swept air.” It says, “the purity of the blaze is a pantomime.” Not a question of power, but an aptitude for pain. The birds perching on prison fences, bus-stops, school-yards, in the eyes of children, there’s nothing out there they are, & nothing in here they will be. As if from certain angles, what we see recedes to appear — A wedding-dress in a walled-in windstorm. Republics of presidents pale as morsels unperishing. An arrangement of stars staining terrors exalted in teeth. Could I name it, I’d have wasted my life disfiguring light into letters, reinscribing rainfall at the edge of dread, growing grasses over graves like shadows on speed-dial. The particularity of the blur which matters, which keeps the world in matter. More than an orbit, a revolution of shirt-tails, a paradise of cross-talk among moss & leaf-mold, an edge-like entry into the oblivion of a rose -coded Thou. Never can I describe it, the leaves blowing past me, this long blue light like arms wet with sweat crossed towards a single trellised cry — Be with me, among the bending of asphodels, the bruised stalks of my “I” feeling out a voicing, not a voice. Flotillas of “we.” The width of “we.” The chorus in the cremations of “we.” No vanishing point in vapor trails of newly scorched vowels, in the singing line drawn through the human, the continuous protest of a tulip’s unreckoned shadow, our vertical attempts at heaven while we wait at vending machines, traffic-stops, consoling an enemy recited behind mirrors, while the mirror itself stands in harmony with the mirror — Does it take place in you, will you tell me where it is? Luminous as our god -long hours, as gas dripping from a man's trembling hands, as sparrows crying over five-miles of asphalt, touching the cries of a woman shuddering in the back seat, where inside all her billowing, a blur. So is this the world? Or the one we are in?

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.