January we awake in the door of
seasons, to another trickster's perseverance,
forgotten in a sleight
of hand. These days we hesitate to wonder
what the eyes hadn't seen.

at the threshold of waking; of the
reverence that begins a child, we
are born into omnipresence.
beside a hospital gown, the ceiling choir,
Loki, a jackal beneath the vending
machine, of thirty arms
he provides himself sustenance,
life to others and death
appears only in the dawn of new ages.

The nurse annuls a beginning,
with the only familiar
pattern of a heart, engraved
into the entrance of thought, before the passage
of unseen apparitions. amalgam
of distant voices and the
hint of a light, was it the sun
itself, abducted, it diminishes
into the weakest subtlety. into an
unseen path, divided by the
hands of a hundred thieves.

the siren of the nighttime leads
him from his mother, bloodied
at the lore of reason. as a
stare upwards reveals the infirm
escaping through the lights. How we fled
through the egress of winter.

In two years, from the gifts of the land,
from the sparse arrays of haystacks, again
our hands arranged an offering.
Of acres there are a hundred
to surrender to the businessmen. The rain brings
a stillness in the latest hours, to again
flood into the fields; the child
weeps in the night at the
spite of acquiescence. A voice
eclipsed the weighted dusk, to again
cede to the rainfall,
in the same melody his halcyon years
dwindle as the rest. into
the eyes of heaven, amaranth polished
the passage of the wind, or was
it a pilgrimage? The wind
in the mid-day rush is
the mistress of the tilted window,
beckoning to it as it slams into the wall.
Your father betrays his words
and fills your home with another.
No small repair seems half
as attained, when something of your own creation
stood in a disrepair.
The dawning season rescinds of the children
the verdant illusions that seldom
rose from the glade.
The awning makes no mention of
its treason to the senses.

You called the winding
dirt path a boulevard. Your sister raises
your fingers around the sun, to pull
it into the folds of the land.

"It's mine,
beside my accusations. See, the land is mine,
because I am everyone," she glowered
in the upward surge of the waves. a
knell of fate. All the men tremble as
the wolf emerges from between
two trees, as if marble
columns jutting from the Pacific
carrying the warnings
of a muted god.
The villagers speak in hushed tones over
those who prowl the wood at dusk. Beyond
the rows of wheat and the treeline, the
sky in the hint of morning is a mirror
posed above the impressionable earth. The deeds
of men in this life, they say, are
scaffolds in the sky, leading at a constellation.
Still here is the afterring
in the cries of every night's bandits. Still
is the silence in the air when the killing
has finished, and the pursuit assumed fruitless.

The deceit of dreaming is the comfort
sought by the eternally indebted. There is a hooded man
who stands upon the porch outside,
his face in the shroud of now the
dawning outline. Gloved
fingers curl on the windowsill- the collector.

Sjorn's father, bolted upright at the wrong floorboard, has
a revolver levied at the chest,
gone through the window and sprinted
remains no sight in these moments,
but at clockwork soldiers forward and
crumbles at the sound. The cries of the mother
wrought vengeance to the ear;
the patrol
is the tip of the knifecloud of dust, hidden
but for the sirens
that mend the crop to disrepair. Outside they
are stooped behind the corn rows and the barn
to inching at the holster. Maryann the spaniel
in the obedience of her lives, disappears
into the cracks of the floorboard amidst
the bullets, like rainfall, It is
a matter of behavior and reward, eventually
her fingers and tongue both lost the compulsion
and so only the projection remained.
amaranth is the
shards of the furnace in the wall, gold lines
along the edges of the stream. how we became
median strips when the days were long enough. How the
airplanes witness a moment before flight, how the
irrelevance of thirty miles below forged
a yellow light, from the ground
which seemed to cut the sky into pieces.
How the expanse of the sea renders irreverance
weak to the fortunes of men. So Maryann, tucked
between the attic and the emptiness of the sky,
had advice for me, a reassurance in hymnals, approaching in parallel lights, across the harbor,
men adorned in their divined garbs. A row of candlesticks
and swords raised upward,
in alternate lines, tailor
a torn flannel stretched cross the brick wall.
Maryann shivers in some long-left
propensity to stutter, heaven is delayed
for the longest bouts of winter.