Fallow

Askew scaffolding, my days – unsafe
a ribcage undone by a butcher’s impatient hand
I’d dreamt a gothic nave – tendon stretched in arc
soaring toward a glittering firmament.

Joists sagging,
dripping bone-milk into puddles
Reflecting space, not stars, 
the smeary undersides
of a sky gone slack.  
Convincing myself, “Im not broken.” 
Just better. 
A mantra to stitch the fraying selvage of hope,
but the thread snaps,
The needle’s eye glints – a debtor unpaid.

Too tall,
A clerestory of intention,
There, time gnaws its knuckles raw,
The wind smells of rust and sin,
and the promises I tongued like communion,
too precious to hold,
are but chalk and simple bread.

God carved with a blunted gouge
turning the formless void
into the cove of frowning providence.
Where a razors edge carves pillows of ease,
whorls that snag and fester
caught on the lathe’s wheel,
Pull my hands in,
Snapping tendon and ligaments.

Occlusions are just character. 

Inhaling clotted air,
a wet shroud folding inward,
each gasp a plea you answer
Through lock-jaw and gritted teeth.

The topography of providential largesse,
Treading the ridges of forbearance,
The rolling terrain – Gripping? Tripping?
I can’t tell.
a spine snapped under a heel I can’t see.
The compass spins,
its needle a shard of doubt
gouging the palm that holds it.

Is this your art,
to sculpt a heart that thrashes
like a fish flensed on a slab,
its gills gaping for a sea
that’s drained to silt?  

I want to say the wreckage sings,
that the splinters of my unmade self
chime like monks chanting vespers
But it’s more like keening,
a bellows wheezing through 
my blank stare-
half-collapsed under the gravepull 
of kavod…shadow….
I can’t tell.
The hymnal so hot it chars-
its pages curling like skin
peeled back from disturbing 
the ark’s hammered gold.

Why this crucible of confoundment,
an alembic where joys condense-
a sludge of what-might-have-been?

I claw at the walls,
fingernails splintering –
Glyphs no oracle can read.
The stars you strung
Not lanterns,
but pinholes in a sail
too tattered to catch the wind.  

Yet still I stand,
a scarecrow,
stitched from unraveled straw and burlap
swaying in a field
fallow and barren.

Your hand, invisible,
presses the throb of this the dull insistence
and I wonder,
through the haze of this unspooling ruin,
if the ruin is the making,
if the chokehold of your will
is the only embrace
I was ever meant to know.

But then
Naked, laying on the floor
I see your word
the gilded edge, 
the glister that finds whatever gleam is left…

Then,



Hope.