Each dumb alone, but
when the lone violin doubles
there are notes we hear
only sung against the other's song;
then we are not deaf.
I hear the song approaching
scherzo in my own mouth,
now when you're near me,
these broken days in me,
my words, I hear them speak to me
in your mouth. The world
near in pain, clearer in pain.
I saw a pigeon's wings pinned
at a breast but the pigeon gone.
I found some nameless thumb
dark in the sky she wanted
a photo to remember: the picture
under the thrown bush thrown -
discarded square of self-marred sky
half-buried in moss and mud so blue.
On the bus to work I saw
a scrap fluttering behind metal
grating of the heater's fan
become the somber, filthy moth
whose sullen, patient, caged flight counseled
divorce all hope from ends -
won't console, love won't console
love is light angled
against light to see. The baby reaching
his left hand to his mother's face -
she nears, says, "Here I am." His right
hand against light in the window...
the lake edge near, so near today.
I'd never noticed...hadn't known...
opposite me, the girl, her eyes
the same gray as teh gray water -
how strange she is in her body,
looking at me and not at me, the lake
encircling and spread out behind her
face, a veil parted when mourning
is done. The violin string
of one strand of silken hair sings
the taut line at horizon
of the lake that will not end.
The lake edge's whorl in finger
print of thumb, the whole lake
in the baby's mouth, the window
so bright, his mother's face full
with cloud, the thumb's song
dark on moth's paper wing,
the girl's eyes are pigeon's wings,
and now I hear the violent now
aria around me:
what endures by not enduring:
the gray lake's lungs, body,
feathers into waves
at a child's breath, the missing
body to the bird's gray bone,
the lake is the pigeon's breast,
wings in the baby's mouh breathe,
the thumb in cloud
plucks the truant string -
whose song descends blue from cloud
and lowering says, "Here I am."
Dan Beachy-Quick
Mulberry, copyright 2006 the author. Tupelo Press. Used with permission of the author.
