Homage to Lead

Not the melancholic bottom of the well, the cloud-slate of the murky surface, the shrouded moon, the unraveled bed.

No defeated pallor. No head in hand impatient for the storm to pass right through. Not fated in the way of the fat calf

who lumbers off to the moaning shelter, or the widow veil of the miner’s lung. The impure, the demonic, Saturn’s child.

No, it is another lead I want to praise. Not the blushing ingot, the alchemist’s ember, not the self-hatred of the gray,

but what centers the pans of the balance, what cuts the tiny zero at the crux. So self-assured inside the open palm,

it is the confidant of the bereft in us. Let water be subtle and swift. Let it run through the hour like a thread of sand.

But lead has the quiet engraver’s hand that lays its nocturne on the fray. Lead as the thing that writes, the thing that’s written,

the string that leads us from the labyrinth. It’s the part we did not know we know. For there is something brave here. You see it

in the smoky red syrup that cools into shapes of miniature soldiers, the backs that cannot bend. With all the weather that scatters the words

of the broken vow, be the muscle, it says, the sigh let go, the fisherman’s sinker. Be the blackened vault that survived the blaze,

the radiologist’s apron across her heart. Or the vat no flame of acid can corrode. Be the man who returns to his bed at dawn,

the long deep breath that settles through the branches, the ocean silt that forgives all things. Across the milkweed of the battlefield,

beneath the sweep of the metal sensor, be the sleepy gravity of all the distant years of loss. Be here. At last.

Even as you walk. Beneath the hover of the history seeker: the solder’s grip, the fallen thunder, the exhausted bullet.