There like a coat abandoned to the drape of a chair, the bitter laid flat out across the palate, the uninflated phrase warm in the warrant of the breath, this framework of a name unspoken. The stormy evening, the warm cup black with incidental ink, porch chimes at a cantor in the revenant winds. There with the sounds that walk through walls and tap at windows, the cobweb cling of memory shaping this arrival, the song rubbing its hands in another room at a cold remembered at the door. Rain on the roof, this ringing always the outwards drubbing the within, the reach of a stifled stillness painted on a page.
The thought comes both summoned and unbidden, scratching at every hour, the bustle around the bell. A life can mean anything left running through, it can be any light switched on. A kiss fumbled, a beauty bemused past reproach, the air thick with anticipation and animal passage. Something scribbled after— a taste, a scent, a sensation missed without relent. The bared belly another hunger jutting from history’s worn bones, the skin flayed with spent feeling, always awake and rattling around.
Every day the cup is empty. Every day you wake to the mistake, wrong headed and soft hearted, the stone smooth from the pace of the river moving on. Like the labor of the tongue toward a lost tooth, the tense informed by the lingering rumor, by the end the aura all that’s there. The order of storms, the rate of rainfall, the shimmering surface of a slickened road. The gutters gush and the eaves spill, washing away all the wishes meant for first seen stars, a legacy of oil slick rainbows and cracked sidewalk weeds. The past all misfired lore and will shaped stones, tomorrow a street picked clean by crows.