To the Beckoning Jailer

Tell me, behemoth,

why your big head looms

above me as I walk

amongst the smokeless fires.

Tell me what you whisper

in deep, high purple,

what precious words

hold coldness between

these molting, pitted trees.

Lurker, I sense not your reply,

silent king of the long, cold night.

Will you light a new fire,

send the smoke up past the blue,

locust, oak, and hickory?

Will you hasten the stars

draw ice upon the mantles?

Whereupon time be shoved back,

your beak pierces a midday light,

the warmth of exiting blooms

and apple ciders, suffusing it with blues,

with bright printed flannels.

Tell me why colors taste so sweet

in the hanging absence of you,

like grasses in mid November, lost now

to water. The white of mint and ozone,

reds of lingonberries. This contradiction,

a bitter onslaught.

Tell me why.

The secret words of your arrival,

incanted up to the ceaseless sea,

a cloud, thick with prayer,

spread in the ever-presence. Behemoth—

you are laden beneath promises

of crackling lattice frost, alighting the mind

with answers; brightening the eye.

At once, you hold open a door

and slam it. I am but a rusted leaf to you—

crushed.

O, beckoning jailer, I’d hold you

red, cracked hands, melt you like candle wax

if I could.

So tell me, beast, what gains he

who embraces the quivering waif curled

upon the mud; he, a storm unfurling?