To Jay Wright

[rowens]

 
 
                                   To Jay Wright
 
 
What do you do up there,
cuddled behind a brown and by now
antique desk that the carpet also covers?
Letting death leak in like a sponge
already wet with more life
than darkness can sheerly reason?
What is the method or the myth
or the inhabitable congress of unweaving,
that it doubles antiphonal
spook-sprays? Claiming in your waking hours
nightmares much like wet dreams,
passion's unripening fruit
resting like an avalanche
above your dotted eyes?
                  Do you then listen to the forecast
and if when calling for rain
turn toward the window to watch the drying out
reverse itself in sheets of adamant clay,
withered tufts of Death's whorehounds,
Father Cronus and Jove's own short-hairs?
a brillig batch on the chest of brine,
a rendezvous with ever-mortality?
                  For does it seem to you,
as it does to me, that we do not die
as we hum along
to tangent wounds in summer's wooden walls?
And when winter comes, its white moths
lighting silent questions on your brain
that ask like brief remembrances of dreams
in the course of conversation with your wife
and her sister Elaine, or the local
Devas or liminal yokai who come to visit,
how best to publish our decline,
the lode-break of dying reading heat
beyond the grotesque cry of the peacocks
as if awake in the midst of sleep
to awaken to yourself again,
to awake to you,
reborn,
awakened to the minstrel of the night
that carries your unburdened song
in the frozen warmth of our beholden light.