There are songs that so sweetly hold us by the neck
to wring our eyes for their watery waste,
going nowhere new and returning home
with vibrato strings, anger in each stroke of sound.
Home is a pillaged field, the killdeer dead
when they did not heed the signs revealed first:
bob-white! vanished, its morning cry lifting the gloom
silenced, wings folded, sun high and no tracks
in the sky. What is there never appears,
skin stripped from the heart, mind gone, touch numb many years.
I thought I might go look death in the eye,
let the wind carry traces of a past away.
I raised my voice. How long such sound roamed there
I did not know a minor key climbed scales of air.
(17 November 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
All the lines are so good, if I had to pick a favorite I would have to pick them all. I, too, talk to death. Every time he takes something that once belonged to me I face him, acknowledge that I do not fear this. The slow taking of what I own is his sneeky, slippery behavior that I hate so much.
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