Canticles

guileless in my green days i climbed to the tip of my toes to hear a tree and the wind clap a rat-a-tat code outside my casement window i was a follower then of minuscule choirs small voices not heard in daylight there i watched the moon be caught in the tall branches of an outstretching tree cats arrived from below the rim of the world where they sojourned whenever darkness threatened to nibble their souls all the creatures that hid in or hunted the night gathered under the tree that had snared the moon there it was i conjured alien letters chanting a mangled alphabet to lamp-lit eyes scurrying groundlings would voice the sounds of being free or imprisoned while i sing-song’d a riff to the buckram-boned and all their moribund answers our tunes were different from any starchy refrain ours had no right or wrong in them we sang in a sibilant dissonance that was an estranged love-poetry strained through the grinding teeth of a longing nothing rhymed in my nursery words they were too sinewy to be captured by any artfulness carefree canticles I once led from beneath a peeping and bean-stalking window when the moon shook itself from the blackened branches it lingered long to listen the stars were as light as snowflakes back then if they had had any weight at all they would have crushed our words into a less luminous language from my bedroom I summoned sounds out of the quag & mire of moonlit paw prints coaching a rare jargon to twitching whiskers and ears and then it was we schooled each other on how not to be caught in the rusty nets of those already fast imprisoned