This January everything seems to draw blood:
The arc of a bird,
the troubles of strangers,
the time it takes you
to come home to me.
Pressing against the season, secrets
palpable as bones
evaporate when exposed. Faith,
when examined,
breaks,
falls unclosed.
Often now I walk the blocks of houses
me, the can-collectors, the retired.
Above us, another existence sits calm as a ceiling
and in the evenings
it rains people home.
No one drowns at this depth.
They suffer.
Sometimes we are fed, sometimes we are left to starve.
The verb to pray simply means to wait.
If anyone is thinking of me right now
I am in front of the glass
watching winter
exist, succumb, and stained
—alight.
Alone I fight to unspool
that tight-bound wing
loosen just one turn
of the shining line that ties it there.
We don’t change.
We just attempt to remain
as time eats everything away
from us.
Here is the reason I burn around:
How beauty
always always
spills from the behind,
exists but in the densities of reflection,
but in the splendor of its demise.
Whispering, ravenous as a blade,
Lo even here, I am.
