Lance Larsen

Two musics washing over me, and morning asks, which loneliness comes closest to the inky chromatics inside you?

It takes a calendar one damp day to declare fall, weeks of dying mums to second the motion. *     *     * Gone the homeland, gone the father, nothing left but invisible north to magnetize your doubts. *     *     * Not eulogies or hearses but the sandwiches after, estranged cousins chewing under one umbrella. *     *     * One clock for errands, one for midnight trysts, though neither will hurry a slow train. *     *     * Prairie is not the floor nor sky the coffered ceiling. Even a scarecrow is wise beyond its straw. *     *     * Look down: a river of grass. Look up: a velvet lost and found. Look inside: no straws to drink that dusk. *     *     * A woman’s watch thieved by a jay—ah, to be lifted like that, to be carried like time across lapping waves.