From Towards the Forest
Patterns Of Migration
At the piano again, the man makes up songs
of lost shoes, staying too late and drinking more
under the unhinged neon of some bar where
inside the big mirror he's just one more tiny drinker.
And the long compositions shift into shadows nearly as forgotten as a snow-flurry
where once he wrote my name eight or nine times
(in long hand) in the condensation on the living
room windows, as if outlining a crime scene,
or searching for the perimeter of my body
in the letters— when it’s always been smell that draws
desire, as each morning, his mother’s huge dog
followed me uninvited up and down
the icy birch lined road. In each standard
suburban house, bodies lie still, toss or rummage
around, faces form in tree bark and cars
and we’re the people across the street
from the people across the street and he
is just another man of scars caught in the odd
orbit of this particular night. Sleepless I watch
birds fly in formation going, god only knows,
the wrong way at the this time of year, and last night
I said exactly who I wanted to fuck, other than him,
because there's little sense to be made of anything
but the rapid moves of the human eye searching
for light, seeking recognition, the retrieval over
and again of what’s familiar, the way he plays it alive—
the way a woman brushes back her white hair with one hand.
©2006 Holaday Mason
Patterns Of Migration
At the piano again, the man makes up songs
of lost shoes, staying too late and drinking more
under the unhinged neon of some bar where
inside the big mirror he's just one more tiny drinker.
And the long compositions shift into shadows nearly as forgotten as a snow-flurry
where once he wrote my name eight or nine times
(in long hand) in the condensation on the living
room windows, as if outlining a crime scene,
or searching for the perimeter of my body
in the letters— when it’s always been smell that draws
desire, as each morning, his mother’s huge dog
followed me uninvited up and down
the icy birch lined road. In each standard
suburban house, bodies lie still, toss or rummage
around, faces form in tree bark and cars
and we’re the people across the street
from the people across the street and he
is just another man of scars caught in the odd
orbit of this particular night. Sleepless I watch
birds fly in formation going, god only knows,
the wrong way at the this time of year, and last night
I said exactly who I wanted to fuck, other than him,
because there's little sense to be made of anything
but the rapid moves of the human eye searching
for light, seeking recognition, the retrieval over
and again of what’s familiar, the way he plays it alive—
the way a woman brushes back her white hair with one hand.
©2006 Holaday Mason