They Will Sew the Blue Sail

Cadenzas | Jesse Lichtenstein

Two burns in a needle of sunlight    not the shared quiver of whitewash. These partial pitches given    to wires, a correction in temperature, instinct felt outwardly.    Here we are lost in a plunge of air. Here we are given a fruit medley.    The ground soaked with brine, cinched to itself. Every backlit text,    each molecular switch or sequence in an orb weaver’s dance,    a massage mined for its light sympathy.

*

You ended higher and suppler and simpler on the rooftop’s ad hoc patio. You listened for sharp accords    a complete sequence, more animated than a miniature demon robbed of his human playdough. It gets easier to recall the flicks and shards    harder to discard them. Later you watch a puddle be calm, no longer agitated by the paddle yet no longer flashing on the    flipside of a reflection.

*

A lover must give thanks and chase the beggar’s urge back into its mud-nest, the downlight glanced by overhanging eaves, under one limited partnership, a single field of fixed causes, a single durable form, a scrubbed white linen sheet stiff with drying, a singleton endlessly bare and dry and waiting to make sail.

*

You receive a gift in return. Slowly the woodwinds crescendo, the migrators choose longer routes, tuned to wobbles in the hum below. To speak of something done to us in adolescence, some brush with dusk, seeping around the edges of a reservoir. To lie in the shallows, always day-old, a dense cadence pumping through the rhizome, bleeding inward and feeding on its own vessel, to be among that feeding.