:: The Hour of Lead ::

I went to bed with poetry in my veins, swirling, its potent poison sweetened by the drownsy haze of sleep.

The wayward beauty of Dickinson came to me as I struggled to wake:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes -
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs -
The stiff Heart questions, was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round -
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought -
A Wooden way,
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone -

This is the Hour of Lead -
Remember, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -
First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go.

And I smiled hello to the day, because the written word has an aberrant power over me, and I was intensely happy - child-like, unreasonably happy - because my morning song began with prose and not practice.

***

I stumble to find
The atlas of my own theology,
Even as I mark my days
With a finite eulogy:
Saddled bird, weighed in by
A yellowing piece of fractured sky.

I stumble to hold
The temple of life's gravity,
Even as I bend and bow,
To its chronic brevity:
Ancient oak, caved in by
A yellowing piece of fractured sky.

I stumble to speak
The language of a lasting kind,
Even as I choke and drown,
By its vile and violent mind:
Sulphur earth, corroded by
A yellowing piece of fractured sky.

***

My thoughts are skylight moths
Drawn to a gentle horizon
In the candlemagic halo
Of dusty ceiling cracks.

Little joys
Immortalized in the veil of my wings
Unclipped, I flit and fly
Towards insurgence.

Dreaming free, these skylight moths
They become
Silly and ironic,
Breathing through the rags of fog.

They don't ask to be art
They don't beg for a legacy
They don't cry for gallantry

Skylight moths
Whispering, whimper
Fit for neither
A beggar nor a king
But how they sing.

***

I feel poetry. I am poetry.

***

And so the year fades, unquantifiable in its diaphanous truths. I empty myself of my life and my life remains.