The Sweet Bite of Licorice Laced Between Fingers

i.

If upon a night late in Spring driven by rain falling as small pebbles from a roof

you were to see her and begin to call out,

would you recognize

how far she has to travel to un-bone her dead

to unbox the ghosts which must be made anew, a requirement,

how much the light of words tugs and tags at her heart:

the gamble on gambolling, as

she hastens to realize the licking upon the openness of things:

her child braving fear and self-hood leaping off a summer cliff, another child falling apart from fear

her mother lost in a trailer dying of the crooked light racqueting over a field of rusted crops and grown weeds,

a murder of ravens descending and quaking away in fright,

their feathers bathing the bottom of her feet as she rubs soft stones through her toes

and recalls him, once long ago, spinning in a dislocated room, clinging for life

as they danced and clanged around each other’s waist

like Spanish moss married to a tree, unkempt: yet

there they were ripening, slowly.

Their bodies as language and a continent of words surrounding them:

name it rhymes, clack, a crack in the tea cup she once found at a bus shelter,

teetering

Soon to take flight in a world of shadows, she turns toward light.

ii.

she steals from others because she absorbs the world

and bites off the smile of the sky’s dark morning eyes

and counts like coins the bravery of people passing through the commuting windows

who still make fit this world, lost by the description of transporting signs left rummaging upon the ground,

the boughs of love

that which will not go untamed--

what will they say to one another or about each other, as the sky swells at the day’s end.

“Can you taste this?” she says aloud, her body’s hollows shaping the empty spaces

and goes running unsteady through the neighborhood

where

the homeless still stroll along with the ghosts of immigrants long since debarked and

her heart wobbles: be love

she things.

we batten on.

iii

And so, it seems we slip, laced between fingers,

a wilding of temperamental recognition and of small opal moments

quiet and dreamt that slip like sleep under bedroom doors in the morning light,

tugging at the nose and belly and eyes of us, un-winked

beginnings as we grow bold as bone

and the sky shapes forlorn v’s in its expanding tumbling toward Earth.

Thus, we have become dancers pliering the light

A convergence of stars, the twitch of fingers, the ballet of our language’s lipped meaning

A recalled story,

Lines of red scribbled from distant interiors,

Sorbetto the color of salmon finning a new constellation,

A tree arched black dancing in the crippling wind with its creaks and whispers,

The green hair, the lost color of leaves,

Dragon bones wed from the soil

The teeth in the sky pulled centripetally home, ancestors’ incandescent markings,

The sweet bite of licorice,

Hands met on the swing and twirl of the park’s carrousel as a vow,

Cotton candy swept away in the November tide, a grandmother’s untangled hair,

the white crack of a match when lit,

as we birth small gestures each to each.

The stones that learned to flower

The tongue that danced with its flame

The lullabies of lost names:

Dare the light, the bending of necks reckless but rewarding winged by love:

Once broke, a whole new you.

Now, do you see her, do you hear them, can you taste this?

Tell yourself:

I walk into a room lit by language

And embark through an opened screen-door

And walk out, anew.

IV

and so, we birth small cobalt gestures each to each:

the stone learns to flower

the tongue will dance within its slender flame

while laced between fingers, they finger lost names

each other’s slender shadow collapsing one another

and in their running between alleyways,

their syllables are swallowed whole

then at last this:

a child slips through the slates on a park bench

his eyes falling like autumn leaves

her smile the sound of broken shells

their whispers relinquish

small silver keys asleep in a mahogany box

lacquered with a brass Chinese lock

their hair kept, disenfranchised from a dream.

They are gathering now,

As they drift toward the wire in the horizon like the tail of a sky-fallen dragon

Wavering secrets and kiting in the wind

Can you taste this.

Can you see them, gone.