"The Collar"
Bells send time onto the hillside after me.
It carries on the wind like a deep-throated crow,
presses silence away from the spire and cottages.
Weaving between morning's hawthorn and trees
as I sit here on a fallen birch. Icicles sway
on the firs. A hundred colours of sky
spill through glassy prisms, decorate this eiderdown
of snow beneath my feet. As each light reflects
another bird searches the woods.
He has sent them,
released their coiled wings from a cage
of fingers. Little black swells that grow
the closer they come. This man in his tower, pulling firm
on the ropes, is masterful-- cracking sky like a pale
blue shell, pushing his shackle of beaks through.
Their caws will find me. Rough twines of string
under his hands are estuaries I reveal
as I brush the frosted bark. These tangle of rivers,
aged and earthy, lead back to him. I taste them
in the air like the bread he broke on my tongue--
dry and clean as the villagers lit a bonfire
in the Square. I heard them singing
as we spoke in the annexe. I told him the wax
on the candle was me-- each time he burned
the wick, my blood coursed the sides, over his table.
He drew warmth into a hungry mouth, tried to catch
the perfumed curl of smoke leaving
and pinched out the flame. I remember his body
moving across floorboards to find me, the same way
he searches now-- desperate and wanting. He calls
through this stillness of winter, but I will not go.
© 2005 Lia (E.V. Brooks)
<
|
|
