Canticles
guileless in my green days i climbed to the tip of my toes
to hear a tree and the wind
clap a rat-a-tat code outside my casement window
i was a follower then of minuscule choirs
small voices not heard in daylight
there i watched the moon be caught in the tall branches
of an outstretching tree
cats arrived from below the rim of the world
where they sojourned whenever darkness threatened
to nibble their souls
all the creatures that hid in or hunted the night
gathered under the tree that had snared the moon
there it was i conjured alien letters
chanting a mangled alphabet to lamp-lit eyes
scurrying groundlings would voice the sounds
of being free or imprisoned
while i sing-song’d a riff to the buckram-boned
and all their moribund answers
our tunes were different from any starchy refrain
ours had no right or wrong in them
we sang in a sibilant dissonance that was
an estranged love-poetry strained through the grinding teeth
of a longing
nothing rhymed in my nursery words
they were too sinewy to be captured by any artfulness
carefree canticles I once led
from beneath a peeping and bean-stalking window
when the moon shook itself from the blackened branches
it lingered long to listen
the stars were as light as snowflakes back then
if they had had any weight at all
they would have crushed our words
into a less luminous language
from my bedroom I summoned sounds
out of the quag & mire of moonlit paw prints
coaching a rare jargon to twitching whiskers and ears
and then it was we schooled each other
on how not to be caught in the rusty nets of those already
fast imprisoned
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2021
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