tom taylor - at morning’s calm indifference

At morning’s calm indifference, the omens cannot be deceived. Increase, the measure of the sign across the table from me. You are there again framed inside the lighted sphere of action, like a spokesman for the celestial region’s housing program. Still hours have left night’s clamorous dreamscape in the dust again, orange and blue disks revolving overhead with their own symmetry and ballast. Might the hour calm some regional participant into his or her own declivities and relimnaries to their posts at the start of the rest of the sleeping hours in their holsters dispatched or held at bay for their redisposition on the calm face of the day’s descriptions marking this hour as new.
I’d clung to the myths of my own participation, nothing less than a moment in the stew of life’s vegetables and seasonings captured like alien features on your best friend, settled glances, children waning, the collapse of everything a fingertip away from real, these are the special qualities with which we greet each second from its latent back and forth in the time between seconds – a relinquished job, an incomplete paint job, the opossum squashed on the road like a thimbleberry or a gnat on the windshield. No dinner tonight for the lax and the posterior flights canceled at the airport due to something, some thing caught in the computer’s glitch and spam for breakfast again you turn the eggs by hand and warm them under a light bulb. Hold. Speak to tongues in their wagging frenetic prelim of content at the helm of the ship now squeaking into port with all men on board at the side of the railings waving their tiny hats in the air, anxious for relief.
And when you come again, the towers move and rattle with earthquakes of intensity recalled from the place where you left them, sighing into noon or tamales without pity and scorn, spontaneous reminders of the air and tempo of the forgotten song which recalls the heart to its destiny in your hands, a meditation on the song itself clears the place next to you for a visitor in the darkness of who you were last week, stranded on the side of the road with no fish in the tank. I’d speak your lights on are holding back the layers of this particular word on the face of time’s clean memory of who we are in this darkness and dispassionate observation from the top of the climate is now blue and green again marking the terms as private or unknown, letting the sports-bar clothe you in unsentimental uniforms left on the floor in the hurry to undress aglow with points.
Rocks your hours without respect for the others. In the dream tears streaming down my face for no apparent reason, perhaps a quality of life itself, maybe another denial from the nether region of thought left in the dark to monitor itself against the walls and sentences from which judgments are made again and again….. now we’ve crossed into the next year again marking these passages as if not mentioned nor particles of light found on the floor next to the wooden sign which says nothing. Other poems remind while this is simply a part of the instructions for a machine you don’t understand but which has been assembled for your justification in the face of anything at all.
Now the residues have settled out ninety feet below the surface of the dusty, red-brown clay known as ‘what there is’…. In synch with the followers who do not see the rumor of their own passing as a tone in the music of the spheres, your allowances are recalled by the forms you’ve given them another tenor in the life of plants. Here is the specific moment in time which calls you out into the sensation of being here at all, askew in its lingering essence but abandoned by the hand that bred them, your face smiling toward me in the morning singing the same song again in welcome to the tides and spokes of the wheel turning every moment with every breath from the depths of now.
These are the signs of day’s beginning in the heart to pull you forward into the light.