The Halifax river burns sometimes, a brackish lagoon where dolphins pass through, I have thought they were angels when young. the bell
rings to lift the bridge over
there/my grandfather bracketed by the red blinking lights and
crickets in his open palm but quieter. just a certain haunting in us in
my mother’s crossed legs and crossed arms when she does not see i watch. I feel the rope, I
feel the ropes of a hammock and will just stay there,
and they are real and hurt a little. watch grasshoppers and think of chasing them though the grass itches, think of chasing grasshoppers earlier that day through the itchy grass to feel their little feet tap on my palm like a song. to feel a happiness/
I think of geppeto, because that’s just the way of it. I think of arms and legs on strings though I am running. at night
the sound of the bell, my mother’s gray eyes as the waters still at night. the stars are all blind but shrewd as an owl who lives in the elm with his sad questions, I see
her tender heart she has delicately fed, like a rose we once knew, who a prince loved like no other who a daughter tried to make well. and,
like a glass dome upon the thorny spine I stay even now when she has gone.
In Due Proportion 