Lay your hands on me

braced against bad weather

what a welcome

coming in from the cold

It’s every time you gather me close

all I can hear is your heart

beating like

Gabriel’s drum of skin

at the beginning of the world

you

begin me

with each

breath

forming laborious as

fatigued children

stubbornly persist

to dance

with half sleeping limbs

slack and graceless

In their abundant honesty

unguarded weariness

not intoxicate enough

to peel them from an ache

for music reveals

your song

If translated

portioning day into ribbons

each wreath a moment

pressed behind slide

to reexamine in mind palace

the sound of life

cymbals beneath earth

flutes and oboe forming wood

paper as soft as hide

writing our language by intoned key

first a rise, a fall, a swell

contagious momentum picking

up trained netting drawing flickering

into chalice

drunk deeply by fingers of pyre

dipping…