Mutters and Utterances

Mutters and Utterances

(“Some magicians think they can wake Leviathan. So let them say their curses and curse the day I was born.” Job 3:8)

I was wondering when your divination would show its hand.
When the mutters and utterances under your breath
would cast their obelisk shadows across the land.

I cannot say what I wish I could. The lake is full of fury,
the river a crease across the countryside. And every moment
that looks darker than the last
is prophesied to be the final event on the calendar
that you think you began.

How many births must there be until
people give each other room to breathe.

The hospitals are riddled with shrapnel and blood,
and yet we lock our doors to the innocents for fear
there is a magician hidden among them. And Jesus never

Enters the doors of churches who do not open theirs.

It feels like a million years of crying, each birth preceded
by twice as much dying. Can I ask you for a hand before you
dismiss me from your sphere? Where did we learn to put
predetermined circumferences around our circle of friends?

I wait too long now. The songs lie dormant in an age so far gone
that the tears follow my wrinkles from the corner of each eye
along the creases in my cheeks. The weeks pass and summer slips
by; a brief breeze of someone I once knew by name.

When grief finally erupts from its deep springs, the mourning
over losses (years of love, missed endearments) obscures the sky
and I hear my papa cry, “you make a better door than a window.”

These days (no lie) I would rather sneak out of the way
than take the lumps for discovering what I had always wished

To be true.