Angie Flanagan
She travels with her opened box
(only a script)
Between dueling images
Her greener grasses
To learn two sides will make a whole
A hole where the world sleeps
While she picks up the pieces
To find lessons like rain they fall
In Fall when her dreams come
(mainly sanguine)
Between dueling images
To master the contents of her gift
That summer we watched fish useless fight
for life inside their tangled nets
Don’t speak now
No, I’ll take that first breath
We argued too long
on our made bed of marriage sex and death
We’ve squandered life and strength
against the mass of others, leap
pink salmon into the steel blue sky
to try for promised lands and gene pools
Never dead and so we die
To meet and turn on city streets
Gray now, and the moon is waning
The shore will sway us soon to sleep
Think no more. Don’t press again
Like cherry blossoms seduce the bees
make forgetful love to greener trees
Youth has flown, the day begins
When words have left too long
Pressed above life’s little messes
Caught. Undulate in drifts of thought
I leave bowls under the dreaming walls
Through cracks, gypsy words will drip
I collect them. If not contain them
At least place my fingers in their cool reprieve
Their naked witness
Pleasure the places theses words have traveled
The minds touched. A momentary flame
The open talons
An eagle skims the gray water
I know the wait of hunger
The reach through cold the others find empty
Enough, in my limited way, enough
For now, to bed
Enough
She lives by her dreams and writes
in odd sentences to drown the noise
of her better judgments
her well-meaning friends
Each thought a creation each
creation a making each
making a joining and in
joining the ancestral memory
Night’s desire caught fire
between two solitary souls
since the world was young
Or art would be nothing more
than building facades and paint
dried on stretched canvas and
music would lack the heartbeat
Lullaby of our mothers and no
song would remember the heritage
of our communal words
Blood for ink our secret power
to survive our own selves
safe passage through the stanza
clean sheets on the line
So it goes for those who live
where the watcher speaks her name
Sometimes I dream myself as dead
And kneeling at the shore of Time
I skim pebbles from the edge
Delight the ripples I can cause
Believe that I have left my mark
In endless circling circles circle
Muted sound of accidental opus
Make waves through your world
The pluck of pebbles float
Disrupt the hairs along your spine
You might wonder if they’re mine and I might
Say yes but I’ve forgotten how
To reach for life below the surface
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