Skies
How we the blue bowl invert except for one white streak like an
old
Man with a Mohawk hung from a chandelier a glass to see through
the sky changes again in a busy day makes us tilt up our noses to
know they’re burning blood in Greeley today again adroit adrift as
reflex relax it’s only the neighbors without even shutting off our
machines infernal we say and spit, a knowing we agree on for
once, though the sky as a forecast for all who can read its stretch
marks is a herringbone of contention like those plastered over the
plains with great tattooed faces praising the sun, moon and other
robins of Fate smiling over our fevers, skies whip-sawed by
concrete images that make us want to test ourselves against their
gale force wills, grave skies, skies that tilt like sentinels asleep on
their feet, skies that move, skies that roar, skies that witness our
secret drives though we do not miss our home fields
If the robins are neither silent nor do they
leave a trace except as after-poems in slates philosophers used to
call innocence, something’s in the sky, air, wind, we say, and in
January comes the Chinook with his warm filed teeth from Nevada
by way of Micronesia to gnaw the selvages of snowcrust we know
the skies the same way we know we’re alive, by the flying debris,
from the prick, the quick from the ghostly split, wanting more and
beyond that blue is black and the glitter strewn shawls and shoals
beyond the shrouds we know, wan, blanched by hints we know it
all already and blot dawn’s
gold out window mingles smells of coffee, the color
we hope is hope, our suns launched into skies of their days, high
thin skies we barely note as they drive their saxophones to work
and get hitched under, the sky with a sun which is the name of one
possible life and the idea we know as we live it, asking What is not
the sky or in or of it—the dust of deceased volcanoes, flecks of
radiated skin, strontium mites, neutrino mines glowing in
commerce city, Cro Magnon angels, skies we see, skies we recall,
skies we have inside, skies gone missing, skies on milk cartons,
skies in the eyes of lost girls high in the cabs of eighteen-wheelers
cruising through Wheeling’s October with yellow red maple hems
and kids shushing through dry paper skins of God, skies that
promise, skies that threaten like angry nuns, like arguments that
end with thunder, and a woman bolting from a table, skies that
feel like blushes at first.
(reprinted with kind thanks from Double Room)
