Music as a Verb

The sounds shed their cellophane, hydrate, sizzle into being.

What was salted freshens: Our minds like vessels,

ships listing on the secret waves

that our bodies must take on

before the music can be entered.

Suddenly a crest gathers, like wheat for scythes of sun. 

Something infinite quickens in the sand.

Your ears become cold tide pools for clawless lobsters

of violin. On the shore the coalsack piano sings fire-struck,

tapping crazy morse to mercury. And the horizon is a length of floss.

Life in fugue, repetition with small difference, 

you are not listening closely enough. Be still.

This is the moment when there are no wasps

and the heart has shed its honeycomb.

This is when our bodies are made less of water, more of eggshells, more of feathers

and we are flying stark naked in an unrehearsed dance glimpsed in fragments through the mesh of unraveling forest.

Deep in the underbrush, we whinny and shake our faces, aching green 

while swans dip their beaks in lakes past ribbons flying crimson flying green.

A deer leaps out of an old poem. Look! the summer clouds are hard-hoofed and broken.

Black metallic branches web the shrapnel of new snow.

New love clings to the fingers like moss to the elbows of trees.

We have arrived.

This is the place where time is locomotives crashing,

and the solitude is bite-sized.

Fragment yourself. 

Delete your bones

and bend.