Restlessness

My daughter comes to the field
of bugleweed and sighs. The air is lithe
as a paintbrush among poppies
and it softens our faces.
I stand at the window thinking
of hours I waste in nervous rapture.
The cat grows new whiskers,
the un-played guitar falls.
Always this introspection
carving the stillness of the room,
the voids turning into mouths
that gnaw, the words turning
into voids, the pages of voids
architectures that move us.
The noise of the moon deepens,
my wife turns and speaks of milk,
how the sky is milk and with her lover
she drinks it, as if to taunt me.
The darkening makes the window
a map-less land, a landless version,
the face in that window full of lies
and the definitions of lies.
Then the land blooms so suddenly.
My daughter stares once more at the ground
and the sky is a great hole to be dropped into.
Stems turn to bone. The porch-chime
nudges from its depths a single ting.

Copyright © 2002 James Grinwis All rights reserved
from The MacGuffin
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission