duhpursuit

These are always the most beautiful days…
while everything holds its last,
before the stems stiffen and drop their sails,
before the snow drifts build and bury all alike.

The small fruits of shrubs and trees have yet to harden and fall,
a bouquet unwrapped and scattered before the vase.

Already the garden leans,
bearing down
under the weight of the few
we manage to harvest before the frost,
before the flies, the worms, devoted to their tides,
drop dead and sodden,
dampening the darkened loam,
building, beneath the belly of sky,
another grain of sand.

Before the sun, still, breaks their trembling and burns
above a rigid sheet of ice, the silent surface,
the whipping crack of dawn.

But now the earth still splits, still seams.
Now the blooms break open.
Easily as ships cut through rain.

These are always the most beautiful days.
Still promises to keep. Still miles to go before we sleep.

from a distance the world appears
half illuminated, an asterisk
glancing the unlit shoulder,
a footnote of sun amending unseen
mountains and rivers, restless and hard
to measure without eating the arid
or sinking deep in the shifting
as solid makes its way to sand.

lightning, a lucid ricochet
that splits the sky in an instant,
provoked by the heavens and all
they inhabit, the silt of the unnamed,
veining black into blue and white,
scatters the soft lining of another evening.
the round heel of the moon
glimmers in the dusty pools
of someone’s basement,
gliding across deserts, oceans,
and living room carpets.

we grow tired of learning
to starve without staggering.
we want for what shines, what slides
full and naked, rippling tides,
startling the placid, precipitation
slipping the smile from the somnolent,
smothering the smell of dry facts,
the sad and the sated, science,
the ritual of allowing the other
to analyze the ancient.
even the experts, god,
cannot completely unmask
without turning off the lights.