The Stone of the Sky

I find myself singing
Hank Williams under my breath.
The stone of the sky opens.
The voice of Luke the Drifter 
Intoned in thunder:
"Alabama, patron saint of car crashes.
Doomed traveler, all you car do is pray"

-Jason Baldinger, 'The Patron Saint of Car Crashes.'


Let only that little be left of me whereby I may never hide thee

-Rabindranath Tagore, GITANJALI, no. 34



What part of the courageous brain understands things? 
Who figured it out from there?

How?

Why were they luck--and presuming they were, why are we not?

Is safety a big part of love? Or is recklessness the important stuff?
Is there gold in the hills of being stupid?
Is there silver, at least?

Did America die with Grant Wood?
Did the requiem cease to be an option with Mozart?

One head of hair must have stuck out above the rest before now.
Otherwise we might not have known to keep going,
That we were right.

A kink of disastrousness must have been growing beneath the surface for us
To watch and pity,

And disregard in the moonlight we've admired.

It's like rain.

The world is simple. You are here and the blood-speckled fruit of it
Falls between us.

If you think it's like rain then it's like rain.
If you've been abused--I am sorry-- and you think its like cruel
Empires, then, that makes sense, too.

I am am trying to unconditionally talk you away from the edge of Everything.

But this is all new to me.

The world is simple.  The safe and poisonous berries in  our ordinance all look alike.
We gather them and consume them intuitively.

We know the seasons, and we hear our favorite songs sung in the air.

The world is on fire, and its backbeam is begging to give in.

The color of canaries, and the color of the wild restlessness.

"If the day writhes it is not with revelations."
-Wallace Stevens


And it came to pass that
Fools fell in love.

Now what.
Obey the space between yourself and them now that they're gone.

Obey it like any other overemphasized warning you might read:
The expiration date is a week shy of what it need be,
The ultimatum is flexible. Your heart beats now.

But that's the flexibility of wisdom, not the potential of chance.

(The potential of chance is slight and wiry yellow, and almost never flies away.)

People pass right through it everyday, outliving their own life expectancies.

When they do they thank god. They look up.

The hooked leaf of love makes a green pass at their shoulders, begging, the fools,
And they thank god.

And they were obedient.

The Island of the Greater Good.

"They went out, locking the door of the theatre behind them; and Utterson once more leaving  the servants gathered about the fire in the hall, trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained,"  

-Robert Louis Stevenson, from DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE

If you've ever dreamed of being dumb as grass
Now's your chance.

The time is right, too,
To read about all the classic monsters--

To gloat over the captive conservatory science
Of Victoriana--

Reassuring yourself:

I may only know a little useless bit of right now
But I can draw a smooth, deductive line around
The past:

The cowcatchers of their trains and black bunches of jubilee clothing,
And the spiritual significance of their orchids.

If you've ever wanted to be dumb as grass and answer to no one
Look just ahead,
And listen
For the singing is here.
Are you blue, are you lonesome tonight?

Do you have a moment to ring like a bell.

The love I've lost has flowed beneath the buck-tooth parted ways in the fence
While I watched the dew raze the grass-fed beef of things.

I really thought if I was beautiful I might live through anything.

Each time, for what it's worth, my enemies beat me because they were small

And slipped through my fingers, while my arms
Rang bells and washed dirty clothes in the rain..

Now, look, the reddest thing anyone can see
is here.

It comes first and it pronounces itself like a lion--

Naive, and roundly roaring landscapes, and bronze hair.

Maybe the part of me that brushed up against you needed the impossibility of
Completeness, as much as the certainty of nothing,

I looked at you, or I would have,
Shivering in the green cotswold of my own two hundred page novel.

I know the grass is yellow at its stems, and gentle things die in fires.  And Leontyne Price
Would sing til we reached the ledge of our flat earth and went over.