High Country Wireless (Imbolc, 2000)

– for Angela

1.
The spirit country is too vast to string with wire,
to arc into a blade-sharp wind
and stand tar-soaked poles across the bottomless miles.

Clouds curve white along the peaks,
sift down through the back country
beyond the boundaries. Night climbs up,
carves itself into the valley floor.

2.
Cathedrals of commerce
interrupt the sky.

But lapping on the shores of sleep,
dreampop pools –

rainbowfish dancing in silvery tides.

Sweat freezes on our faces,
our breath like angels flying back to Heaven.

3.
We bind ourselves with ice and darkening sky,
we are blood music lingering in a booth at the back of the bar,
we fumble for wavelength on an antique dial....

We are the disconnected generation:

our fathers and mothers, broken on the Christian Wheel
our unborn, more circuitry than flesh

our brothers and sisters and friends and lovers,
whose anesthetic memories of us are dust motes
floating in a stained glass haze....

But you shimmer,
vermillion gash ripping the afterdark,
haunting the dollhouses in Daddy's little dreams.

Shine it on
burn it down
scream until the night sky shatters

raining shards of star and borealis
caught, like glitterpits

black and sparkle in the laughter of your eyes.