Wild Eye Wise

*** Nobody loved like they did those nights splayed like open books, soggy foils at humid peace, at least until the next morning riot. *** I ran to the coffee shop last street down, shouting your name to a third person, wearing your face under the lamplight, flickering over like a newsreel from the next day, with a breaking story. *** It cracks like a stiff spine making it difficult to turn the page, like us ing in the morning roar of crow song threshing in the birches; then running buckets under the ceiling spigots at night all reason disavowed. *** All reason is tuned to divining rods searching for water searching for the cardinal heart beneath the ribs flipping its bird truth at the bathroom mirror, in that quick space between sticking it out, or cutting bait. *** Our cracked spines are chapped palms, pocked open hymnals bleating profanely the dissonance that is in our key, the twelve-tone psalm they hallow, as they learn the liturgy of its respiration: its own dodecaphonic Ode to Joy. *** Two fated deer, supping out tonight amongst the thorny thorns stretch their necks brink-over a steep cove’s edge, and a brittle rocky drop, stretching out for the sweetest berries only; come the long rut way through the woody woods only to stare at themselves square-wise, astonished survivors, wild eye to wild eye wise.