Placid but Tense
Placid but Tense
All the while and all of the wiles passed with idleness and indolence.
Even humor and brevity have to take a break like a load of lumber,
A front loader by the coal car.
Faces rubbed by the backs of their own arms.
A larder stocked, air pressure ok.
A leitmotif and the brim of the cup is white with milk.
The salmon in the stream is pink and black.
The hamster in his two bit maze is tired, hot,
Laying in to die like a trout in bad water,
An over stuffed bull, on ogre, an orgy of excess.
Lay in with the supply train,
You buckets and hats.
Gentle notion hold our heads,
As with both hands, elbows on the table,
Stroke our cheek or
Laying on your side, stable in bed at last,
Head couched in the crook of arm,
Pillow primed for blank sleep or
A tingle of retreating dreams.
It is the nether of never never that fires the neurons to disbelief,
While still the colors run,
The air hums with the nuance of her scent
Left hours ago in still sunlight with motes of floating dust.
She left us here as the desert leaves the night,
To come back later after a feast of sunlight and heat,
An imagined future of shadows made by sky glow and sand.
An Ibex and Elephant,
Coastal lions and starving multitudes strain their necks
In some make shift camp.
Some more human failing,
Stomachs, imagination, compassion, heat.
Who’s fault,
Who’s who and how, becoming another,
Do we keep track at the pool hall and the watering hole,
How surrender efficiently what we are so willing to give up,
Our lives for a cause and the pressure all around
Like a line too urgent for single file,
See how it swells as the crowd pushes forward,
Passive but ready arms, bent at the elbows, up against the chest,
Defensive but ready to push.
Food lines, gas lines, animal scratch.
Take me awhile on the afternoon bed,
The heat still high but cool enough outside
To raise the window for a breeze and outsized hope of rain.
My dry eyes you say after delivering such news as,
“You will never be the same”.
You have started something with someone else
By our Lord of the Meeting Rivers who watches
As the smooth surface of a pond, for rain drops.
Despite desire, you may not know below,
The pull of the flat river’s strong currents,
Her eddies and tug in your mind
Outlasting, out waiting what ever errand you claimed
To pull from bed last night out into the streets
Walking like a fever, roads we know too well.
Going around the block is not likely to accomplish the transformation in store.
Not likely to lift the heavy bales to the hulls,
Not likely to fill even the stomach of a bird with praise.
So vain is the eye of a man on a woman.
So touching how she smooths her blouse and hair.
So much mud after the flood came into our house.
Like stilts we moved around on the furniture,
Over the warping, sand damaged boards
Where eager sprouts in the crevices already sprout
Their doomed, yellowing tangle heads of hope.
How much more we pledge,
Hand in hand, eye to heaviness, heart to greater service
Saying words like honesty, humility, forgiveness and hope.
How vain the look of man to woman and
Back she sings of me and the river and vanity.
Back she springs like the verge of cat commitment
Eyeing the still sniffing whiskers of the mouse,
Calculating as the raptor on wing might envision
Pulling the entrails of the little cut creature with its sharp beak,
The cat’s claw, the man’s eye and her borrowed gun.
Shoot!
We urge her.
Pull our trigger,
Lift the curtain,
Start the show.
Shoot, cut, start again
The spool of our story
By the little temple of the river god
Accepting all donations,
Placid but tense.
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