Points of Departure, and: Naysayer's Apprentice, and: Casting on the Deerfield, Labor Day 2001

Points of Departure

How do we lay them to rest, the ones we call ours, their many parts drifting in directions we fail to recognize, then settling - discrete, isolate, beyond our modest senses? They escape the grip of hands cast in a mold before fire.

Those that rise, upon rising, walk, and through unexpected mercy leave the frame. Leaving us trapped in our rooms where, at the top of each hour, the towers fall yet again.

First the body, lain on the sun-warmed floor, breast reflected, belly reflected in the sliding glass door, the hand sliding down, the finger searching for any pulse. The quickened breath, the lips wet, legs opening opening. Then the eyes register a contrail, the body coming and coming before following the white gash across the sky.

Naysayer's Apprentice

I came to him a strapping thing, alert to the meaning of ampule and vial, to the flirtatious plink of poison dribbled into tinctures. Cloudy beakers and a crushing pestle symptomatic of the pouty love he indulged, a secret swaddled like a wound in gauze, sepsis camouflaged in camphor and mint. She blazed, never resting, like Revlon's Poppies-in-the-Snow, while we dreamt of Lister trampling a lawn of narcissus, waking only for the end of romance.

Casting on the Deerfield, Labor Day 2001

A practice of the wrist, most delicate articulation, as she plants herself in thigh-high water, seal-gray waders pressing into the home current. An illustration in arcs, the line lengthening into a single prayer, twilight threading her hair with blues.

The intrusion of sound, of smoke billowing upstream, the valley filling with clatter and chuff before the engine makes the curve that serves to soften our steep grade. The bank feels suddenly flimsy as the train passes - long and looming, tilting at the angle of peril and progress, its metallic complaint more grating than Marley's chains.