Todd Boss

—not pen. It’s got that same silken dust about it, doesn’t it, that same sense of having been roughed onto paper even as it was planned. It had to be a labor of love. It must’ve taken its author some time, some shove. I’ll bet it felt good in the hand—the o

while the black oak takes coaxing. That popping and whistling? Yellow birch and red pine. Difference might for now define, but soon the whole church is chanting at the same time, flame splashing bright from the dirty bucket of the earthly, roaring likeness and only likeness into the bottomless cool of the night . . .

—no matter how much muscle I might have mustered—my mother was like to come along behind, reach around me to take it up again from where I’d left it, lift it back into my line of vision and in one practiced motion from that strangle in her bare hands and thin air work a second miraculous stream of silver dishwash into the day’s last gleam . . .

than we do when it’s all wound down. I don’t know why we settle to the sound. Somehow the regular click and chime of passing time, like water, turns a water wheel that turns a gear that turns a stone that turns upon another stone and fine and finer in between our dreams like grain are ground.

to beat the froggiest of morning voices, my son gets out of bed and takes a lumpish song along—a little lyric learned in kindergarten, something about a boat. He’s found it in the bog of his throat before his feet have hit the ground, follows its wonky melody down the hall and into the loo as if it were the most natural thing for a little boy to do, and lets it loose awhile in there to a tinkling sound while I lie still in bed, alive like I’ve never been, in love again with life, afraid they’ll find me drowned here, drowned in more than my fair share of joy.

govern a canine meeting, their paws all over instinct’s greeting, it’s we who do the dancing there, lest our restraints ourselves ensnare. Over the head, between the legs, we tangle with our rules & regs like film in a projector’s cogs, reclaim the lead, then blame the dogs.

Despite that you wrote your name and number on its fuselage in magic marker neither your quiet hours at the kitchen table assembling it with glue nor your choice of paint and lacquer nor your seemingly equally perfect choice of a seemingly breezeless day for the launch of your ambition nor the thrill of its swift ignition nor the heights it streaks nor the dancing way you chase beneath its dot across that seemingly endless childhood field will ever be restored to you by the people in the topmost branches of whose trees unseen it may yet from its plastic chute on thin white string still swing.

the templar halls of museums, for example, or the chambers of churches, and admire no more than the beauty there, or remember the graveness of stone, or whatever. You don’t have to do any better. You don’t have to understand the liturgy or know history to feel holy in a gallery or presbytery. It is enough to have come just so far. You need not be opened any more than does a door, standing ajar.

You can tell by how he lists to let her kiss him, that the getting, as he gets it, is good. It’s good in the sweetly salty, deeply thirsty way that a sea-fogged rain is good after a summer-long bout of inland drought. And you know it when you see it, don’t you? How it drenches what’s dry, how the having of it quenches. There is a grassy inlet where your ocean meets your land, a slip that needs a certain kind of vessel, and when that shapely skiff skims in at last, trimmed bright, mast lightly flagging left and right, then the long, lush reeds of your longing part, and soft against the hull of that bent wood almost im- perceptibly brushes a luscious hush the heart heeds helplessly— the hush of the very good.

at neck, at shoulder, that stokes a man as he grows older. Nothing rages, nothing fumes. No one races through the rooms, alarmed. How casually he's armed. How gradually arises what surprises in his mirrors. Unawares, as fall runs colder, pulls he only slightly tighter his good wool sweater, thinner than ever now at elbow, at shoulder.