Song for Sparrows

She is spare, as a sparrow,
small and trembling—
all angles, and bone, and tongue,
thin skin, the endless
desert of inattention
staggering toward
the mirage of touching.

And you warned her…
but you kissed her, regardless.
“It won’t mean a thing,” you promised.

“Yes, yes, I understand…”
all words are merely
translations of
sly sky
weeping,
open pores
seeping dreams,
leaping
beyond moments when
we are not caught
sleeping.

Everything:
shuddering to a stop,
remembering impermanence
in all of this
(see?…what a mess!),
the moon has watched us
and laughed.

She is trapped and
wounded by
mirrors flaunting the
flaws of her face,
the lack of emphasis
in silence, these
roadmaps to wrong places or
indecipherable glyphs, the
impetus for conquest:
every trespass and weakness.

She has won
through to the edge
of nothing, watched the crusts
forming, wet wells growing churlish,
refusing to sate thirsts—
weathering the storms of dust
until faith is drained as
the dregs of memory
consume her taste for
God in the rain, when love
was a light that might surge
from the canyon of lips
to push against the drought or to
weave these terrible
strands of absence to fullness,
leaving no space

for the motionless: her
apparitional sparrow dance,
phantom mute so
when she flutters into the room,
you can’t even hear the
swish of her skirt or
imagine the feel of the
cotton when it brushes against
the air you expel in
your singing, or sighing, or
in the whispering of her name
when all the lights
are aimed
away and
no one is watching…

She can’t be seen.
Even when projecting visions of
Technicolor,
inflamed,
lit, yielding, leaning forward
and forcing her palms outward
like a mad woman
gone soft in her shellshock and
luminous with the grief
pressed deep in each letter, forming
words to convey the beauty
of explaining absolutely
nothing
to any
man—
to say that she
can’t take back what she’s done, or
how she won’t be spineless,
sitting in a room, acquiescent,
waiting to impress you with
a view of her attributes and
a list of ambitions.
You know who she is,
even when there’s a question.

She is frantic to
leave an impression,
though it bleeds her free
of the sap that traps your
fingers against the delicate bark
of her heart; shakes you off with a
single blink that
tucks her face behind
rice paper shades—enigmatic,
substance that changes
her day
by day, drawing closer to its
end; you must follow her
blind curves by intuition.