The Altering Outer

Green acorns litter every step from deck to gardens. Manna is a matter of perspective: one's bruised bare foot is another's windfall.

The blinds are broken on the bedroom's west-facing window. Now they are always down – closed to sunlight bent through pines / to orange-red-pink / to the familiar benevolence that anchors unspooling days. In the room of windows I push my knees against the creamy corduroy loveseat to turn it more westerly for a time. This thinner light takes it all apart. Certain salutations hover over an image awaiting the recognition of touch; how easily the story drifts without it.

Colder nights bring animals in to the bedroom walls. Acorns, rodent parties, and eleventh-hour fireworks sew the seams of midnight into a sleepless wholeness. One considers the altering outer and is arrested by the lack of stasis. So she drifts, Beloved, picking up what rains down, not to collect or store – but to live.

Standing at the edge of his bed I untie my black satin robe more shyly than our years together might suggest. It's playful at first, but the kiss finds a way to betray...containment, image, proclivity. What was closed, opens; distance crawls away ashamed. This ingress allows one to pass tracelessly onward. Have we not met there before?

Potato leek soup with fresh fruit on the side. More doctors tomorrow. More change. How increasingly strange to notice the aching knee or dimming eyes when the Watcher is climbing the mountain!

Every night for hours I listen to her scales and etudes and solos. I know her phrasing and how it is informed by auditions and professors and goals. She is better than I was and she wants it more. Her art grows resonant and amplified.

Quickened and stilled / I am caught in it.

And so finally, the weekend fulfills a last promise, and night reclaims its infinite reservoir. Which dreams will transcend? What hair-line crack of truth?

I gather myself / into folds / of raven robes / in hand-tied play / undone