Artful as they go down, cagey,
Mangy with contrivance,
The patterns fold out into spirits
Each with a rhythm
That dances around the whole
With salty plum lickings,
Shaking in the hot quicksand,
Rolling with the bells
Of breeze through the branches
And bellowing hollows —
Roaring voices
Climb the pounding floor
As sticks, insistent, hit, and blades, tickling, twitch
And cut the dullness of the skin that singes
And gasps for breath amidst smoke and alcohol.
Scoured metal tubs misdirect,
Mangle, and modulate
The proddings of nerves
Broken in the sweetness of their pulp;
As they are brushed in cadence, their pain bends and stiffens
In the back and forth dynamic to the divine:
Rhythm as logic,
As the massing of electrons around the empty space
Of which all matter chiefly consists,
Strokes of order:
Dancing becomes painting,
Painting becomes forests,
Forests become the heavens,
Which are precisely the sky, as the wind is the word
That in its whispers gives form to the prison,
The freedom that feeds on itself,
The whammy bar bent on the sunlight.
Out of the sounds of stellar shells
Grow imagined universes that light up the northern sky
And reveal the streams running through us.
