Out of dreams now a woman steps into a dawn
where blue shapes cut the sky into outlines
of leaf and branch, yesterday’s whispers
marbling the shadows where they’ll
dry, bake, and disperse with the sunrise.
She had shed names over the years. They fell
away from her like notes spoken into deep places
where echoes return stranger than their
origins, dripping with the liquids of alien
languages, licked by distant tongues.
Her father’s disassembled first, lost letter
by letter and sound by sound through the weave
of pages, or slipping through the grills of storm
drains in streets she found empty and dry
with promises bundled into tumbleweeds
wandering the intersections and crowding
at the feet of buildings where taggers have joined
themselves to the bricks in black and red
and orange, naming otherness with empty
calligraphy and charms shaped like knives.
Out of dreams now she feels the pull
of the sky in the cool light, the gravity
of names, the potency of heat in the west.
She raises a finger and writes (to test) a name
and then another, writing on a canvass shapes
never before spun by human finger or spoken
with human tongue. She caught a spot of the sudden
sun and a few strings of wind to mix the light with,
and the names matured into rings, petals, song,
two new galaxies turning in the air above the world.
