JEFF CALLAHAN

Stay open. Pass through everything And everything is but one pledge, One turn, one prestige, One easy silence, One crystal lucid illusion, One word – Stay still. Retain your love of life, Embrace the warmth of cold kisses and simply glide-glide-glide Into the sprawling fertility of a playful Eternity. Make no allegations, accusations, declarations, implications, revelations, reflections in rippled puddles, just slide-slide-slide, be you all, be what was, what is, what you will help to create. Hope is a pink ribbon fluttering toward the mountain peaks on a cool, valley breeze.

Your ghost melts like soap in back pockets While cherry-lipped saints on window sills Drowsily hum obscure, little hymns In the idealistic dawn And eighteen hollow flutes announce Pretty girls with fog swept faces Tumbling down misty front steps With a lilt in their thorny ribbons and tangled flesh shrouds. In tones thick as blood of a day old sacrifice Pooling desperately on cracked limestone, they hiss, “Were we forsaken Or just tragically mistaken?” Will I awaken Or simply float disemboweled in the abandoned country Where love flows like dirty water From rickety bathtubs with plugs drawn? We were elegant in our simplicity, Pushing away dishes of apricots On carpets of fresh, fragrant grass, And lying in lion postures When the ferryman shouted, “Anyone for the other shore?”

In starless, moonless onyx night, The place where the wave finally broke and rolled back, She is wandering. Everyone here wanders, Features masked by their private dark And memories barely breathing. Whisper into the ear of Creation And wash up red in the tide of her dreams, Spinning sour lies into the sky of sleep. When all haste and cravings wild return With the rising, unrelenting sun, Look twice before she bears all life away With a demonically sensual face, Howling anything that comes into her head, With the kind of long, luxurious feeling of losing That relieves a man of his soul. She has gone behind a passing cloud For the first time in forty days. Vultures mingle with the gathering crowd, Twelve times the size of God.

Please believe your memory has not aged unremembered, For when labored breaths from heathered woods are heard “What a sigh was that to claw out of a young man’s chest,” Gathered, one-sided sinners lament then discuss Your dark greetings, vividly blooming of vulgar saints blessed. Had our love grown thin and faint as the new morning mist, Turned grotesque as rich carvings, nourishing by centuries Ruins of marble fountains fondled by Autumn’s spicy breeze, Or mirrored the sun’s razorsharp decline in belladonna skies, Perhaps your memory the rugged hands of time could eclipse While embracing nothing of me save what suffered your eyes And bidding me embrace nothing save what escaped your lips.

Though twilight tapestries wilt And the sun’s wrapped in a double pinwheel quilt, Angels still rattle my last dried sunflower stalks With instinct that guides moss grown children toward sin. Does my hour grow late? Come, Devil, for you is this world given When the bronze altar bell rings out her name, So we can throw copper shadows on millstone walks And mimic a graver gait In unison with her shattered windmill frame. Midst the rambling hymn of voices parted, Picture the once faint arc of rainbows On the sporting breeze and chasing mysteries Of frayed canvas boards shattered against stone thresholds, Copied from the richness of my visions Living under her sway. Though twilight tapestries wilt Over mindless waters slowly choked with silt, Angels still rattle my last dried sunflower stalks Giving vent to our maddened inspiration. Why must we hesitate? Her own scorched foothills run like a ribbon When with stars we huddle or in night drown, To sidelong eavesdrop on mist clouded hedgerow talks And mimic a graver gait While love’s watch I keep as the straw settles down. Withering rootless and butterfly-hearted, A bohemian breath, the east wind blows Scattering our pleas and oral histories While murky thunderheads blacken the rain-washed folds Weighed down like starched, lamplight decisions And molasses and clay. Though twilight tapestries wilt As rows of wooden crosses randomly tilt, Angels still rattle my last dried sunflower stalks Saddening us with their imperfect beauty. Do you I fascinate? Lost in a delicate serenity, Quarter moons splinter upon her dark eaves, When water bearers weep as bemused fate balks And mimic a graver gait Over thousands of feather-veined willow leaves. She is seeding into ash. I am sprinkled in her wake. We fall like loosened marble and alone must break. Has the grove forgotten us? What o’clock now is it? Walk with me in noiseless step and we may revisit Our luster she confined to stooping, wayside towers And bound with weary chains and melancholy hours. We have baggy, scarecrow souls to hem and coddle. We have corked Heaven in a thin, black glass bottle.