Sunday, November 27, 2016

motion

when i woke, i went straight to
music and what i heard
set a scene one might picture
if awaiting the rise of a curtain

on some expected play
between actors we know
and whose work we have
a certain anticipation toward

or maybe that was the mood
i was in already when i awoke
and the music was a mere
conspirator? either way

the music felt like a prelude:
a softly moving bass, the strum
of a guitar, the slide of the jazz rake
across the face of the snare

the laying out of a rhythm,
the pace akin to a stroll
down a leafy path in
cold, wetted autumn with its

smell of the sweet decay
of the world on either side,
of sodden woods and the effusions
of cedar and pine

a man's voice comes in,
a lofty tenor, like a swallow
crooning up high in a barn
or a coyote call on a

ridge above the valley,
singing about a slow-moving
river on a snow-gray morning
or of something she lost

and the curtain draws open
at least in my imagination and on
the stage are two figures in silhouette,
frozen and waiting the lights

and that's when i knew
i should be alone to think about
recent scenes between us that
placed me in such a closing mood

but let me keep this confined
to a simple idea: love is not won
by talk but by the violence of two hearts
and a compulsion toward their unity

so it is with you and me
that we give out so much
in our passions and clashes and
rights and wrongs, the truth is

we have our primary source
of difficulty, our dramatic
situation to keep this play
on its feet and moving

we are personality upon personality, we've
got our cause and effect, our exercise of wills;
we have our action in the wishing of something
done and the doing of it, or the failing at it

a struggle means we've got movement, my lover; and
movement means we're alive with it, pulling in our
opposite directions, all of it a kind of goodness
and all of it just enough balance to be vital and breathing

we've got the small business down, too;
the blocking is perfected;
our habitual actions that keep
the eyes and ears busy:

you draw the baby's bath and i do the dishes
and you fold the laundry in the front room while
i start a fire in the stove and by god do we
like to see things getting done

there is drama as much in the healing of a child's
bruised knee as there is in the healing of our
bruised pride, tears and laughter come to an adventure equally
and hold the same station in the theaters of heaven and hell alike

the lights on this small stage are aimed in such a
way as to illuminate us in a singular spot, giving us
tone and a sharp focus, and everything surrounding
us – all the people and their events – is in a gray shade

let our audience look upon the play
with unpassionate eyes, seeing the flaws
in our action, the kinks in the motivations,
the poorly placed climaxes

we followed our own second thoughts
in the manufacture of this story after all,
because there is greater validation in the
inspirations of the heart than in the mind;

it makes us irreducible to their methods
and therefore we should not be
surprised by their distaste for our little drama,
as if it is a foil to all their proofs somehow

we play our comedy and our tragedy
on a single wire and live not by the
shallow mechanics of some joined plot but
by the depth of our plunge into life

we have the contrast and with it
the balance and our entrances
and exits and our business and our
passionate pleas and counterpleas

and our pulls and our lovemaking
it all strikes a fire in each other and
that's what keeps the drama
moving

i thought maybe the song i woke to
was about the disaster of two people
who'd spent their currency on
the ill fates and poverty of bad living

and how it spoke to me in that one
way, how it spoke of the troubles
that vex lovers to the point of distractions
that steer them toward a tragedy of ends

but i think now i misheard it all,
listening with intent and hearing
the meaning that the mood told me
to hear

the way our audience, in their patronage,
wish upon our unfolding story
what they suspect is a truth
they themselves are eager to consume

but the plaintive song, with its
drawling moan and its languid
slide toward a darkness not unlike
the sun's bow to winter,

is talking to me of you and
of you and i and of us as a one
always waiting our entrances,
our dialogues, our business-making

our pitches, our advances and set backs,
sometimes against each other's grain, but
sometimes along the same grain, a
pardoning of sins or ungranting of wishes

sometimes, when we intermit to take a moment to consider
a scene, we become melancholy, sure that living through so
many negations is just one bad episode following
another and we become convinced that we're playing this all wrong

that all this jousting and pain suffering is
a sign of a broken thing when placed against the
play of others, whose stories seem to be framed
by more accomplished actors and with greater ease

but thinking on them, thinking on them in a reflective
way, i see that a farce moves likewise: easily along
a flat path, without motion, without fire, and performed
for the sheer enjoyment and edification of their audience

i repeat myself at this point:
love is not won by talk but by the violence of two
hearts and a compulsion toward their unity, so i say
let them talk in their stasis. and let's remain in motion

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