song to call sun
March 2025
Then god gave me half
of a prophecy, etched on a verb’s
hook. the bark on the winter
that was passing shone broken
with names, even on ripe trees.
I lit a morning fire and did
no work at all. the question of
what I would eat or how I would
survive melted in the face
of the prophecy’s second
beat, pausing for another voice
to seek it. the tiles, the mantle,
the houseplants happy in their
station. it was not mine
but the flames leapt silently
in their unnatural heaven
of wood, an orange and blue
riptide containing though
parted from the spark of the
rakia. If I relied on god, so
god relied on me. the prayer
between us in a longheld
mutuality, shared tending, my most
recent dreams already memories
while my nerves culled new answers,
birthing on the face of things,
expanding. there was no better day
for the sky to be so cool
and grey, I preferred my
bones chilled when the shapes
moved through me.: a blood
sister pausing on her way
home to sleep. a building decaying.
the staircase in the valley waking up
shook, to learn finally what the others had seen:
its own interior secret, unknown
to itself before this morning—
a desire to trade places
with the water swiftly shifting
its thread over the mudless
closure, under foot bridges from here
to the ridge—the second half of the
fervent answer always waiting
in someone else’s vertebrae.
I assented of course, unable
to deny that you were also my prayer,
as even oceanweathered wood cannot
throw off a flame who’s biting:
the puzzle its own fortune.
the body her own claim. and love
itself within the current—yet not
at all; a hidden sun, a silent sum, a moon
added to no number, and light never
waning only shifting
within space to alter our perception
of time, as we Authors finally dressed
as our unshakable neutrality.
I walked up to the ridge each day, even
in weather, sleepless and half-starved.
It was nothing, it was the agreement
I’d made, I was only practicing.: the mountain’s echo
in me, a pebble out of voice,
a skimming, a dam that wanted
felling. I arrived as I did everywhere,
at an invitation from the dust, the rain
half-repressing until wattage would out
and the land bore me threadless back
to myself, altered. Here was that home—
not a single place, but a ferocious winter
throughout which we had nothing
and still danced:
my gold-lidded gaze, my blue robes embroidered
with the matching sash, my muddy reddish
dragoncat remote from me, curled up
beside you. my fingers dressed again in Photographs
of futures found or lost, sapphires and eilat
stones; my neck adorned in jasper, silver come from
Other Lands we met, whispered our sullen silent bodies
to. we were given gifts everywhere
we went. the earth spilling over to make our home
along the long wall
of the road; our home whose walls wrapped me
like butter. my home: your home:
our arabian leopard, arrived again to a number
more than zero.
when the fire here broke weight
and put me to sleep, I still hungered
after you. I still watched the leaping
moths, knowing nothing at all.
✳