Paced

Paced

There’s a bald eagle’s nest,
high and dry in the bald early spring branches.
I admire the illusion of dryness today,
which once was a fecund place. Inside,
a desire for only missing chords. Currently,
no sense of rhythm and flow. I feel them,
tone colors, sounds impossible to produce
by mechanical means. The heat of red,
the metamorphosis of a bruised violet hue,
the deep baritone of a vast blackness,
sprinkled with plucks of high register yellows
like a night sky with dashes of stars stewed in.
I could drop out of life right now for sounds like that.
I could live my life dreaming of things
like flower petals, the sound of someone reading
a love poem in French, the way light reflects
off the stained glass windows of cathedrals,
making beautiful bodied biblical figures glow.
I dropped out of school because I wanted
to learn to remember how precious these
small things are to a life. Right now,
My heart has followed some inner cry
to a winter swamp. The congested dried
out messiness speaks to me. I I hike
in this window of an afternoon. It’s delivering
a landscape lost. My heart is lost.
My boot sinking into the mush of earth
tells me, ‘this is no place to dig.’
It’s evident what is lost here needs
to be lost. There is a whole ecosystem
that thrives on this, who am I to challenge it.
The dry next above me is constructed
of all things once thought to be lost.
Today even the eagles are nowhere to be found,
but it’s perch high up in the tree affirms,
sometimes we let go and let be
so new things can be created and born.
I might not have a heart or words,
but I have tonal sounds
and the green moss growing
in the midst of husky tan death
feels like the sound of the bass
hitting my body, reminding me
The music might not be loud,
but it’s still playing. It can be felt
If you’re still enough there’s still
that THUMP, THUMP, THUMP,
the noise that right now feels like
a pacemaker slowly bringing back
My heart.