Devin Johnston

White ash, you wait for me as I will wait for someone. What but skin feels the wind, what darkness makes distinctions? Breaking down dusk and dawn, housewreckers on horse scaffolds syncopate their hammers. Brick dust drifts like smoke, tents of habitation withdrawn, hinges of habit undone.

A mockingbird perched on the hood of a pay phone half-buried in a hedge of wild rose and heard it ring The clapper ball trilled between brass gongs for two seconds then wind and then again With head cocked the bird took note absorbed the ringing deep in its throat and frothed an ebullient song The leitmotif of bright alarm recurred in a run from hawk to meadowlark from May to early June The ringing spread from syrinx to syrinx from Kiowa to Comanche to Clark till someone finally picked up and heard a voice on the other end say Konza or Consez or Kansa which the French trappers heard as Kaw which is only the sound of a word for wind then only the sound of wind

Zipping your skirt, you rustle past, sand hissing through a glass, with the Bedouin snap and flash of static-electric sparks disturbing fabric. This morning’s charge could rouse The Desert Fathers of Sinai

A rail, buff-banded rail, weaves among the legs of picnickers who loll at ease on the buttress roots of fig trees. It queries fallen fruit with manners so refined as to be indeterminate, its herringbone immaculate. Aloof though underfoot, the rail extracts a crust of pie from picnic residue — no seediness, no trace of table-scrap solicitude for any human hand or face.

I’ve tracked myself from day to day how many steps through a field of snow how many hours have I slept what have I eaten what did I burn calories or cigarettes what birds have poured through Bellefontaine where mausoleums bear the names of Busch and Brown Lemp and Spink on marble white as winter endive when I can read my title clear to mansions in the skies

A pair of Orpingtons, one blue, the other black, with iridescent necks and fine, ashen fluff cackle through the dark, their damp calls close enough to chafe, a friction with no spark. They settle down to roost, two rests along a stave. Each curls into itself, comb tucked beneath a wing, as the days grow long enough to kindle in each a yolk, the smallest flame of spring.

After William IX, Duke of Aquitaine As sweetness flows through these new days, the woods leaf out, and songbirds phrase in neumes of roosted melody incipits to a new song. Then love should find lubricity and quicken, having slept so long. The bloodroot blossoms, well and good, but I receive no word that would set my troubled heart at ease, nor could we turn our faces toward the sun, and open by degrees, unless we reach a clear accord. And so our love goes, night and day: it’s like the thorny hawthorn spray that whips about in a bitter wind from dusk to dawn, shellacked with sleet, until the sun’s first rays ascend through leaves and branches, spreading heat. I have in mind one April morning when she relented without warning, relenting from her cold rebuff in laughter, peals of happiness. Sweet Christ, let me live long enough to get my hands beneath her dress! I hate the elevated talk that disregards both root and stalk and sets insipid pride above vicissitudes of lust and strife. Let others claim a higher love: we’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife.

A blast off the Atlantic snaps a flag in the Firth of Clyde, while thirty leagues away, the same synoptic wind surges across this hillside honeycombed with mineshafts, sounding the unstopped slots of a "G" harmonica left to dry on the kitchen sill. Snow charges a sky in which the sun swims and glimmers like a groat, a turbulent space where owls hunt by day but nothing stands for long—bereft of circumstance—beyond the standing stones of Long Meg and Her Daughters. Through the night, like a stoker on a fast express—the Hyperion on its Edinburgh run— you hoy buckets of coal on the grate, only to see its flames drawn up the chimney, getting more heat from hoying the fuel than from its burning. As a barnacle goose swims against the dark, uttering its terse honk, you pull your favorite word,duvet, close about your head. Tomorrow, bailiffs may take everything not hammered down.

Oysters adhere to things, no eyes: spat on the smooth curve of a pier they feel shadows and snap shut. The sun wavers while anchored below each distills Tomales Bay, accreting waves within its shell. Voluptuous and cold, Kumamoto trembles on a thin fork, liquefaction of cloud. Rain distorts glass, our tavern submerged all afternoon.

On Christmas Day, Kathleen and I propel a raft with plastic spoons through the hissing fur of surf, stirring as we go an Alka-Seltzer sun. We pass Bolinas-Stinson School, the fire house, and Smiley's dive; extinguished geodesic domes along the mesa road where Cream Saroyan lives. With a telescope, my sister spies the erstwhile chemist of Argonne who left his post to polish glass. As penance, he engraves a glyph of hydrogen on the blank face of every cliff from Monterey to Inverness. Beside us, cormorants describe the chop in grunts, then plunge through thirty feet of grease. I try to hold my breath as long and cheat or fail. As evening comes we pass the final spit of land. Once more around the Horn and then we'll make for home.