Suspend for a moment
your faith in the orderly
progression of time.

Discover your first image upon
abandonment of that notion is of
an eagle chick not yet fledged

tumbling from its high nest,
then suddenly sprouting feathers
and flying to avoid the drowning

promised by the lake rushing up
from below to shatter the bird.
Don’t you feel better?

Things, at least in your head,
don’t have to make sense to work. Imagine it
as having left your mother’s purse

in the jailhouse where she died
and going back to find in her cell
baby pictures from the wallet

(pictures of you sprouting wings)
plastered everywhere. In the visitor’s room,
some have been made into posters:

“Have you seen this bird? Have you seen this child?”
It’s got some kick to it, this fantasy, doesn’t it?
It doesn’t have to make any more sense than that. 

Go with it, rinse yourself 
in the milk of it,
taste the reminder

that before anyone slapped you dumb
with education and indoctrination,
you believed you could be an eagle

when you grew up. How bitter it is
to have remembered this so late in life,
when your mother and father have long 

passed and can’t possibly soothe you.
You could have flown, been
iconic, been in this all the way.

There’s a man in a jar
on the high shelf. Not preserved,
not pickled. Just sitting, 
alive (it’s claimed), walled off,
visible. Maybe he’s angry,
maybe terrified. Maybe
he’s feeling an emotion unique
to the walled off, the exhibited,
the left on a shelf. It would be good
to have such an emotion — not to
have it for yourself, not to feel it,
but it needs to be described.
It’s new to us, new to humanity. It’s 
a function of how so many of us are
connected without having any feelings
for each other. We fake it a lot, though.

Perhaps the man in the jar on the shelf
is tired of faking. He’s rocking the jar
now. He’s getting it closer and closer
to the edge. It’s going to fall and those
pieces are going everywhere
and chances are
he dies in the fall.  

Let’s watch.

Not enough.

Does there really need to be
even one more line
explaining 
how little I’ve done
with my talent and 
soul? How little 
I’ve sweated, how small
my reach has been?

No.

Enough.

There’s still time.
There’s work.
There’s breath.

“…Satan, your kingdom
must come down…”

Thinly voiced, static-creaky,
Blind Joe Taggart’s guitar 
drives the old tune down
a narrowly rising and
falling blue road — and
am I hearing a distant trumpet
in the background?  Not in the song
itself, not in the recording,
but out in the neighborhood
somewhere.  Never heard brass
like that around here before.
The ancient crank who lives 
across the street will now and then
play marching music, military bands
blaring from the second floor
in summer, but this is farther away
and not like that at all; it’s at once
more plaintive and more ominous,
fluidly expert, a dangerous snake
of a melody falling in behind
this old-time apocalyptic warning
of Heaven’s eventual triumph:

“…I heard the voice of Jesus say,
Satan, your kingdom
must come down…”

I’m no Christian, not at all;
I just like to hear a good guitar
driving a good road. 
I like the crackle
of old gospel blues recordings.
I like to stand apart
from dead voices and hear
what drove them to sing 
without feeling like I need to fall in
with their fervor for the subject. I like
that chance to pick and choose
my personal soundtrack
for what may or may not be
the End Of Days without feeling like
I have to despair and wail along,

but man oh man,
I did not count on that trumpet.

When moving across 
yard or continent
toward peace, 
across a border
or a walkway
toward something
you hope will be better
than where you are,

you place your trust 
in an ancient wisdom 
that suggests your feet
know more than your head
and your heart know, or

that when and if those
are in conflict, the decision
should be turned over
to those who have always been
closest to the path.  

My own feet must seem dumb
to those who don’t walk
as often as I do, since
I have stumbled more than once
into swamps and piles
of refuse upon departing
what seemed intolerable
at the time, found myself
staring back toward
what I’d left behind and muttering
about my idiot feet; but then

I turned back to the direction
they’d chosen, and slogged on
to the next destination
that would soon become
the next point of departure;

I might have regrets now and then,
might have let my feet choose poorly,
but look how far away
the first intolerable place I left
is now; look at the meanderings
you can read in my footprints,
the magnificence of that often 
broken tottering toward this Now.