SHOVEL SONG
I’ve already gone. I’ve already
Left the premises
Into the misremembered dusk
Of verbal declivity
I had my second immolation
In the Land of Nod
I became a reverberated thing:
Instrument of ash
Waiting for my prophethood
Its white intaglio
When angst was still an attitude
To exit the gnash
Survived the fortune-teller’s breath
How I squandered it
I counted kings along the via
Dolorosa, starving
In the posthumous vocabulary:
Only the inertia
The gemstones and sea glass
Headfuls of lead
If I have to do it myself I’ll do it
I’ll script this life
I’ll bury the dynasty of prodigal sons
I’m indebted to
And saying every lake I set on fire,
I meant them
And I did it for the glory. That I
Shrithed to the earth
What difference did it all make?
My engravery,
That I made a forgery of years,
Fell its minarets?
What did I have to do with that,
What wilting?
That I desiccated the bullhorn?
Murdered the calf?
Then I’ll enact my private autumn
Ex machina, immaculate.
Shot with starlight, ineffable,
I’ll follow
But there is no going forward
There are no vowels
Conscripted by Persephones
I’ll follow
COMMON AND VULGAR ERROR
1 .
This world does not always carry over.
I have seen it, laid out beside the light blue tenements, looking up at the dimly-lit sky.
Somebody passed out on the asphalt made a sound that reminded me to tell you this,
That memory has its callouses.
And it’s not the suedes of touch but the callousness of speech that prevents me from reaching the quiet side of space.
A place where the trees are impalpable.
Where the sky is clear, flawless.
Almost audible.
I want to hold a torch on this trip across the campestral.
To float a lantern over a leftover layer of snow, looking for an answer.
I want to reach you with all the gentleness of sacrament as we peel the old territory from the compass of our bodies.
Know that I have been a beggar on the outside of heaven,
kneeling on the arches, facedown on the interstate.
Passed out on certainty.
Maybe this is all there is.
2.
Maybe this is all there is:
The lees of something too inconsequential to remember, a world awash with refractable rays, afternoon slanting through a skylight in the skull.
The thought of someone approaches me in the dark.
There’s something I have to remember about the body I used to inhabit and the omen in my voice.
Mosquitos flail about in a cup of white vinegar before floating on the strength of their wings.
Which is probably a metaphor for something.
Normally I like to watch the woods fill up with light from nearby traffic but tonight is extraordinarily void of population save for these faces floating by.
Which look superstitious in the streetlight, crooked branches viewed from a cold angle in the dark.
A mnemonic I made out of vision:
Blackbirds.
Diesel. Blackbirds.
There’s a hole in the sound of footsteps, a temporary pause.
The kind of quiet only the stars can bleed.
3.
The kind of quiet only the stars can bleed,
I want that.
A place for the wings to cast a shadow on the mind.
I pictured these palms in that other life when I still believed they could catch the sound of feathers falling on the car.
Snow swerved inside my veins.
Light was a bubble in my skull.
But this world does not always carry over, so I have to tell you about these omens I keep inside my voice.
Vultures broke through this sheet of solitude and reminded me to tell you something about life in the outer territory:
What birds will you be wearing when you walk across that late stage of snow?
How many times will it take to carry you back to stasis.
Feathers cover scars.
Ultimately I want to meet you at the crossroad between death row and eternity.
Yesterday I walked across my other body dressed in memory’s supple tar. Dressed in desire.
I missed that.
4.
I missed that.
I left my other body in an arctic quiet.
Blackbirds helped me discover a cure for weltschmerz by flying into an open wound and twining my nerves.
Sometimes memory approaches absurdity.
I remembered the voice I made when I was a child and how I watched it crumble in an angle of lamplight.
I wound up with an omen that I said I wouldn’t carry.
I made a sound that could carry the burden of language in the dark.
That was the moment the pine trees were stunned back into shape.
These palms could touch the scenery at the solstice of all our certainty.
The stars in alignment with an ideal becoming real in the evening stage of idleness.
I’m looking forward to a firmament where the skylights shed a pillar on this undisguisable side of loss.
The territorial heart, a plot for the wound:
Your first step into flight.
5.
Your first step into flight.
Do you remember how we left behind our secondary bodies on our way into the palaces filled with omens and snow?
This world is only solstice.
I sunk a light inside the mind while I watched a fire in the moon, signalling something to someone I’m not anymore.
This world is only a swerve within the confines of a vein.
An alignment of unrelated words in the shared obscurity of language, feathered in starlight while the dusk fills up either palm.
Maybe this is all there is:
Blue tenements and tar, startled wings falling on the car.
An open wound in candlelight, twisting into autumn.
I remember when the light was still a swirl inside my voice,
A spark reverberating in the speech one afternoon that led me to conclusion.
I’m wearing all my birds.
I’m beginning to understand the meaning of my own mnemonic hunger, the vertical movement of an hour.
Pure candle wax. Small tempos of light.
This world does not always carry over.
FAILURE
They will find me apart from what I said.
They will not understand.
What I have said has nothing to do with how many days and hours I have left in the night.
What I have tried to say was still greater than the grand total of my actions and the words that would fail to describe them if they could have been accurately spoken.
What I have wanted to say will not matter until I renounce the goddess of the moon.
I have lived my life a hierophant to failure.
I still stand by everything.
Image credit: Franz Marc, Genesis II, 1914. The Cleveland Museum of Art.
