The softest of shadows dream and drowse, the day on bright and the television loud. The cool uncoils against the skin, the summer restless in the flesh, the window stirs and shines. From one faith to the next, hill after hill towards the sliding sky, the hypnosis of the road moving beneath the still gathered around your spine. The map is always catching up to your breath. The words spent in the lull between the stones and the stars. The things meant for silent, the things meant to said. The moments where they replicate.
The air is bent to effect, the bass line and the elaborate rattle, white noise and baffled atmosphere against the ubiquity of heat. The jostled air blots the drenched from the flesh, thick with drizzled sweat and the accumulated swelter, still with whatever effort is left. So goes the radiating day, pelting the entity from all sides with immanent energy, the air ablaze and rapt with the spell of busy atoms. So goes the hot slice of window and the magnetized rousing of the woodwinds, witness to gradual magic and switches left on, the ghost of your splendor echoing in every surface and mirror. I can only imagine and remember, and leave the words untouched.
The words emerge well below their boiling points, the sieve of flesh glistening with sweat and punctuation, the ghosts always wrecking the galleys. Black coffee with shining constellations of vestigial cream sparkling in the mood of the room, dust and caution, heavy volumes and unused light. Once I was say the shelves and mementos, now I am say the curser and the cursing, I shall be says the urgency from form to form. Despite the guest lecturers and the sigils they scratch, despite the backmasked faith and the well shared jest, the engine still turns over. Not blade or bell or slicing vine, not needle or curse or cheap platitude will stop this old knot from the bind. The words follow the lines and their tangles, they are the intentions pressed into the stone, the map that makes itself. All the asking left us, naked and dripping in this heat.