Chronic

were lifted over the valley, its steepling dustdevils the redwinged blackbirds convened vibrant arc their swift, their dive against the filmy, the finite air the profession of absence, of being absented, a lifting skyward then gone the moment of flight: another resignation from the sweep of earth jackrabbit, swallowtail, harlequin duck: believe in this refuge vivid tips of oleander white and red perimeters where no perimeter should be here is another in my long list of asides: why have I never had a clock that actually gained time? that apparatus, which measures out the minutes, is our own image forever losing and so the delicate, unfixed condition of love, the treacherous body the unsettling state of creation and how we have damaged— isn’t one a suitable lens through which to see another: filter the body, filter the mind, filter the resilient land and by resilient I mean which holds which tolerates the inconstant lover, the pitiful treatment the experiment, the untried & untrue, the last stab at wellness choose your own adventure: drug failure or organ failure cataclysmic climate change or something akin to what’s killing bees—colony collapse more like us than we’d allow, this wondrous swatch of rough why do I need to say the toads and moor and clouds— in a spring of misunderstanding, I took the cricket’s sound and delight I took in the sex of every season, the tumble on moss the loud company of musicians, the shy young bookseller anonymous voices that beckoned to ramble to be picked from the crepuscule at the forest’s edge until the nocturnal animals crept forth their eyes like the lamps in store windows forgotten, vaguely firing a desire for home hence, the body’s burden, its resolute campaign:  trudge on and if the war does not shake us from our quietude, nothing will I carry the same baffled heart I have always carried a bit more battered than before, a bit less joy for I see the difficult charge of living in this declining sphere by the open air, I swore out my list of pleasures: sprig of lilac, scent of pine the sparrows bathing in the drainage ditch, their song the lusty thoughts in spring as the yellow violets bloom and the cherry forms its first full buds the tonic cords along the legs and arms of youth and youth passing into maturity, ripening its flesh growing softer, less unattainable, ruddy and spotted plum daily, I mistake—there was a medication I forgot to take there was a man who gave himself, decently, to me & I refused him in a protracted stillness, I saw that heron I didn’t wish to disturb was clearly a white sack caught in the redbud’s limbs I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until— daylight, don’t leave me now, I haven’t done with you— nor that, in this late hour, we still cannot make peace if I, inconsequential being that I am, forsake all others how many others correspondingly forsake this world light, light: do not go I sing you this song and I will sing another as well