riverbed

        “Au Hasard” by Dans Dans | [Figura solitária/Untitled, 1957, by Goeldi]

hailing the arrival of new wor(l)ds

with a cut in the mouth to drain the silence

she, who’d promised not to hark back

to the time when a first dawn flashed up before her

like a pelagic flower born of the abyss, effulgent, she

was in her spot, quiet, disgruntled harmonies

were perhaps…pervading the bedroom as a damp chill

slunk across the anemic-lighted asphalt outside

graciously rigged with a dragon fruit aroma at that time,

and the neighborhood…stretching itself awake

this and that arousing handfuls of poetic imagination…

the real, “yes, images burn once they touch the real,”

and so it went: the morning lit up her loneliness

while she set a white page down on her lap

and just remembered, gloomily enough, that they

didn’t even have or take a photograph

to thunder through in days of (riverbed-)distance.