Litany

Rain this morning is the glazed blue
of the old fruit bowl on my table, a culture's
stab at sky. I wake, a litany of bones betraying
their secret origin in quarries where longing
is a vein running through the white lode.
They are telling me something about time
that I know, something about eternity I can't
take in. There's anger, there's anguish. Put them
in their corners and turn your back. They will
make mouths at each other behind it,
acknowledge each other across it. But how
do you get out of the room and what do
they do when you are gone? The sky's drained
of color, the landscape attenuated, thinned
to the flat fields of existence. La di, la di—
there, over there. That is always where the sound is.
Spell me a while, the bones say, let me go back
to the dumb luck of being inanimate, the white
hope of speechlessness. La di, something answers,
thread of song, voiced consonants grieving
for what morning could be: undetermined,
free of the machinery of recurrence.

Copyright © 2004 Sandra Kohler All rights reserved
from The Ceremonies of Longing
University of Pittsburgh Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission