Grinning altar of twenty years warbling variations of thriving light. Hear that powdery sound of ashes. Hear that crackling sound of unfired absolution. Hear the warbling neighbors and grinning children, nervous and amiable, a clashing band of flames dancing at the threshold. Invalid tongues split reason. The thing is, deep gentle reason shows nothing called meaning. Dying levels out. Still, imagine a hummingbird. Those two wings curving a thousand breathless cymbals. Imagine tongues split and hear lungs ring the dying dance. Sock-footed nothing. Dark matter. Breathe in the traveling music.
Put on the wheels of bird armor until the shade of Heaven confronts your breastbone. Motionless metal mosaics feature chariots and dog faces blinking in the dazzling eyepiece of rattling man. Your weight threatens my limbs. Cobblestones curve and crown the silenced mouth ablaze and shooting cindery fevers to flower the strange gaunt hand and the beam of nailed wood.
Huddled deep-rooted in darkness a cancer steadily speaks its office. Hear with your eyes! Death changes flesh to sparkle, bodies to forest. Changes. Your song yet to drift beyond its window, yet to turn grasping secrets into hovering voices of light waking the sleeping source of the unclasped world. Open your palm and the grave. Mouth and fingers plant the army of light trees yet alive in that ultimate told and magical wood beyond the sun’s Easter choir.
Perceptive enough, the human gaze licks itself with the fascination of sorrow. Line and curve glitter, and still unearthly arms require neither bird nor bush. Home holds the slack taste of changing leaves. A son still intently watches the cold dust drift earthward. Barns and graves shift and graze, confident the essence of fields will hold fixed in harmony beside churches and bejeweled branches. But love shifts in midair, itself not bitter or uneasy, forgetting the heart and the body, requiring no farewell.
Peer passed vibrant stalks of rain. Think of his absent face now uncaught by earth, light among stars. The man is now stardust. His voice like the riddle of dreams. Whoever unfailingly loves a cowboy, truly loves him, meets him hand-to-hand and head-to-head, a connection like home until falling is the only tangible move. The love allotted hurtles like raging stars to some tough and poetic parting. It waits forward unobstructed amongst the stringy sawgrass somewhere in the dead of winter, somewhere past the speed of light.
Darnell Arnoult is the author of the novel Sufficient Grace and the poetry collections What Travels With Us and Galaxie Wagon. She has received the SIBA Poetry Book of the Year Award, Mary Frances Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, the Thomas and Lillie D. Chafin Award for Appalachian Writing, and the Weatherford Award. She lives in Mebane, North Carolina, where she continues to write, coach other writers in virtual gatherings, and critique manuscripts.
