The cloud is a rippling white balloon suspended in a blue so sweet my teeth ache. I carry the cloud on a string, blind to the rainbow at my back.
"No precipitation expected today.”
Only the squawky talk and tap of the street crows, who pick at the popcorn a neighbor left for them; the birds dodge slow-moving cars with the insouciance of rock stars. No participation expected today. It’s Christmas and there’s nothing to do but sidestep thoughts of the year to come and consume the body of a blindsided bird slathered in rosemary and lemon rind. 100 percent prestidigitation today. Time hovers with the patience of the tagged and tortured, waiting for permission to move on, and, permission granted, travels at the speed of the joyless. morning lines #157
There are cardinals in the sky, red-feathered and biretta-capped, some avian, others ecclesiastical, out of sight, these days, but somehow on my mind. morning lines #156 Here it is Friday, like all the rest, without the rest, but with the morning magic of let-there-be-light, even as hope heaves a sigh and wonder walks out the door. morning lines #155 Now you write something. Picture yourself in a can-opened Airstream on the desert valley’s deadly floor. You’re exposed to the thin sexless air; the chill settles into your femurs … forever. But the night sky with its diamond-dusted blanket of black warms your eyes, as you drift off. Soon, the earth clicks into place and light undoes dark. The desert’s morning tongue unfurls a parched but perfect new day, where punishing sun, sand, stinging insects, and the beauty of a million wind-sculpted minimoons coalesce. Now stop writing. morning lines #154 She craved a life lying spread- eagle on warm volcanic sand, not making snow angels in Ottawa with a wan Canadian man. morning lines #151
Nothing’s pretty on me anymore ’cept my toes, their dumb-numb piano-hammer music of forgiving—a pardon to my face, which walked away years ago in a huff. I could’ve argued and pleaded like an alarmed lover. Instead, I let it slip away, my unconvincing grip going slack. My toes, doing tenfold the duty, erased, as if stamping out, all memory of that hand-some face. morning lines #150 She wanted to live a life with the animals, all soft fur against slippery skin, inhuman haunch meeting rosewater thigh A silent silver knowing, like silk entering the veins Playful mornings after food, on the damp woolen ground, endless afternoons of rolling, weeping, and licking wounds She wanted to die with the animals, but only if they were ready to go morning lines #149
The arms of forgetting pile up around me in a jumble of fusiforming phantoms. As each dream from the night turns to vapor, another arm is thrown on the heap. The arms are smooth and fleshy beige, like tubers or dead fruit on the vine. morning lines #148 Every morning, I stare at the desert mountain in my living room, the painting I can’t finish. Finishing it would take me too far from the sand, rock, ocotillo, and honey mesquite that allow me to breathe, that blow me up like a balloon and release me into the secular cerulean, across the only landscape that loves me back. morning lines #147 maybe I want to get out of bed and read this with coffee as the dog sneezes and we both listen in the queer quiet to the plastic green fan I set up not to cool the already cool room but to make noise and obliterate any nascent noise and my thoughts in their sleepless wandering morning lines #146 red swept through her not like blood not for the sake of Christ not because she raged, slapped, and swore; red was her transmission fluid red was all she said morning lines #145 leave the love and laughter to the dead man, like a surgeon in the night, he holds each with hush-steady hands and the confidence of death itself |