Wedding Season: B-sides

Transition

My body’s frame, ripe with jostling bone and liquid along the

Path next to the river.  Heartbeats lace my breath.  The ground

Feels hard.  

I see a family of ducks mildly drifting, nestled firmly into the water’s

Orange, chamomile surface.

It is sunrise.  

I too, feel magnetic pulls, urges to migrate, and

Bump constantly against the rib cage

Of my flock.  Duly, my insides smart

Like a finger, licked and raised to the crisp wind.  

A few brown paper leaves are falling.  When I watch them fall

It’s as if the doors in my eyes

Shed their handles as well.  

I wonder now--what you will grasp onto when you

Want to come in?

And I wonder how south has become

Less a direction where migrant feelings flee to

Than an artery,

An uncontrollable pouring of what I thought myself to be

Toward an ocean of loneliness

Just outside of focus.  

A loneliness that means a few things:

The silk boniness of cars passing in the street,

The swollen machinery of the way we are

Grandfathered into this world,

And the memory that friends walk together in the rain not because

They enjoy getting wet but because

They don’t really notice it’s raining.  

Farther down the path, the image of the ducks still strokes

At my salt block heart, coarse and caring,

A mother cow's tongue against my most fragile self.   

Naming this season once felt so simple.  

Now, I speak only in flakes of

Paint, chipping from the words

In the sold-out church of my mind.