Ravens come: not in what we hear or read
but taste within
ourself unseen; mother smell, new baked bread,
a lorn of lemon cakes, too hot for thin
fingers resting on wire in sunlight.
How fat we should be were nostalgia real
and how toothlessly sweet. It bites as sharp
as the rasp of them that grip now so tight
and snarl at any who dare sin to feel
their past, your past; raven bargain's: smart
like spit...
Oh how I loved those Sunday walks
down lanes so lazy they made no bend,
when we would as a family talk
and say 'hello' to strangers and to friends.
Like spit we taste the past upon our tongue
and on our lips,
almost as an insult of that we long
to be. How seductive a story is
when the hero is someone facing hope
full in the face without our faults. Always
somewhere to go. Today birch shimmers
like children talking, the leaves catch the sun
and in the evenness of nothing says
watch the raven's eye, see how it glimmers
like spit....
At the level crossing gate when passing trains
made us wait, I reveled in the thunderous shake,
as I waved in the wake of skimming faces
and fought my sister to raise the latch.
Like spit, on the slapped cheek of forty years
in a marriage,
turned from oysters to dandelion blown tears
and fears to flown water. Dressed brocade
forever turning at waltz step. The fire
flushed and requited, shines more there, brightly
where the swan's clipped wing draws only kisses
after thunder. Long fluttered on a spire,
pulled from mountain's heart, runs the stoney
path, parched and sandy comes reminiscence
like spit....
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