High above there is a brushfire of voices wending through the occluded caverns of memory; just below there is a thick fold of under-dream dripping upward in play upon the smokey screen of consciousness; these two scenes join; it is like curdled milk settling in the stomach of a rabid child.
Underfoot a shrill plateau of shifting earth, a flat slide of moments speaking in tongues, calling up ancestors to writhe nakedly in progenitive dismay; there are sighs heard everywhere; he stumbles, then erects himself by unfurling a sail of grief that spreads out against the gray of yesterday; he stumbles; the canvas floats off into the horizon.
His left foot now begins to outmaneuver his right; sidestepping himself he is divided in two; an awkward parody of himself; a brotherhood of twin misapprehensions; slipping between the space that he once was he straddles an inward craving that is sharp and smells of the blood of flowers; he stoops over to pick one; mistakenly he plucks the wrong dream; the world ends without a thought.
He is at it again: nodding sleepily into his wine, fumbling to grasp a cigarette as if reaching for a fragile piece of love, his mottled paw pounces on the slender white stick creasing it with a lurching impatience. He is good at being old and drunk, so very good.
So when his children, now grown, slink by him all too willingly, and his grandchildren totter by silently, he is reminded of the ghosts of his youth, his wife, and the wall of death between them; and so he drinks and smokes as the generations pass to and fro in front of the window of a raised glass.
And so it is perhaps not so strange that, although he has lost most everything, has stumbled over every rock of grief and has slipped on the pavement of memory, like a prophet he can sense the clear bottom of an empty glass before it is time. Perhaps the near-end of emptiness heralds the loneliness of the tongue, or the dryness of the soul.
This is a good day to drink, he tells himself with each hoisting movement. He is well a-wash in it now. He is nothing but smoke and sweet vapor. Yet if you look close enough you can see the fiery stones of a seer dancing behind his eyes, the wry smile of a pierrot painted across his face, and on some days you can even see that suddenly he is young again and cares not to toast death that day.
Umbriate Press Poetry 