Ravi Shankar

Particulate as ash, new year's first snow falls upon peaked roofs, car hoods, undulant hills, in imitation of motion that moves the way static cascades down screens when the cable zaps out, persistent & granular with a flicker of legibility that dissipates before it can be interpolated into any succession of imagery. One hour stretches sixty minutes into a field of white flurry: hexagonal lattices of water molecules that accumulate in drifts too soon strewn with sand, hewn into browning mounds by plow blade, left to turn to slush.

My hair, voluminous from sleeping in six different positions, redolent with your scent, helps me recall that last night was indeed real, that it's possible for a bedspread to spawn a watershed in the membrane that keeps us shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure, that I didn't just dream you into being. You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue, give my hands their one true purpose, find in my shoulder a groove for your head. In a clinch, you're clenched and I'm pinched, we're spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched in a chestnut by a mob of our own making, only to be resurrected to stage several revivals that arise from slightest touch to thwart deep sleep with necessities I never knew I knew until meeting you a few days or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.

Speeding, without destination, after dark torrents have poured & been returned at home, the skies above mirror my mood, windshield wipers knifing through sheets, back roads slick with pooling, when a shard of cloudlessness opens. Pulling over, cutting the ignition, I unstitch myself from the humid seat, still fuming, to greet a full spectrum of color arcing past the treetops in lockstep with its fainter inverse. Archer's bow, hem of the sun god's coat, bridge between worlds, reconciliation & pardon. They don't last.

Honest self-scrutiny too easily mutinies, mutates into false memories Which find language a receptive host, Boosted by boastful embellishments. Self-esteem is raised on wobbly beams, seeming seen as stuff enough To fund the hedge of personality, Though personally, I cannot forget Whom I have met and somehow wronged, wrung for a jot of fugitive juice, Trading some ruse for a blot or two, Labored to braid from transparent diction Fiction, quick fix, quixotic fixation. As the pulse of impulses Drained through my veins, I tried to live Twenty lives at once. Now one is plenty.

Gregarious in hunger, a flock of twenty turn circles like whorls of barbed wire, no spot below flown over uncanvassed. The closer to death the closer they come, waiting on wings with keen impatient perseverance, dark blades lying in wake until age or wound has turned canter into carcass or near enough for them to swoop scrupulous in benediction, land hissing, hopping, tearing, gorging. no portion, save bone, too durable to digest. What matters cannot remain.