Trees hunch over sky; skin and hard-bone cliffs. Come winter: beards of ice, grunting stone. That day I walked into surf, wore a shawl of sea spray. Still in her armchair, my grandmother wades past headlands to open ocean where waves wrestle and refract. And then farther: there, the sky is unbroken and the wind never blows. Her returning rain sews green to grass.
Aaron Daigle
Trading Countries
It began with fog
and headless homes.
We lose sight of star-markers;
streetlights burn out.
This is a world of crawlspaces,
children digging through mulch
or gravel. The steppe-streaming sun
uncoils, scalelight rasping stone.
We root into baked sand for bones,
pitch the worst of ourselves
into river.
I think that if I touch her
she'd unfold into cherry blossoms, skin
slipping off, hoofbeats
in lieu of a pulse. I feel my own
composition: apples
in my throat,
dry-brush ligaments.
Horizon peeks from valley's end,
blue-eyed. I have seen these hills
on the other half of earth,
centuries soaked in the land's spine.
Opening
This bar grew from stone and wood, russet and cream. Trees lean on the porch, nonchalant. I'll take what he's having. Hear: phrases sung from in-between. Strange babies, microphones desirous of lips. Buddy's car was having trouble, brakes like grinding teeth. Overhearing, someone fixed it without saying a thing. One table collects candles from the others; they divine in flames reams of words, faces Midas-oiled. Without power, the set moves acoustic. Two inscribe a circle: their voices are caves, cloisters of scarce-seen motes. Light falls far from here. Guitars've outgrown us. Drums move inward. I touch you, in the way it was before language, and my lungs brachiate into song.