Emmanuel

by Fran Lock

sometimes the sky fights me. sometimes the day
is a dogful of loss. sometimes the day is a desert,
a prolonged and hopeless music. how the heart
has timid discipline enough to make you retch,
and i should gather in my wan rejoicing, stone
by stick, by feather by stone. sometimes i walk,
and sometimes run – caffeine's acrid circuit in
the blood – by shuttered shops, and faces numb
with bargain. i pipe a syrup grace through buds,
a song to steer my pleading mood: o come, o
come. and souls descend and stride at will. this
i'm told, so pull myself together. sometimes
the day is more than i can stand; devise my
thriving failure, a silvery charm against fame.
in the arcade, how an old woman's mouth is
twisted in its figuring, how a young boy cups
the flickering gift of a stranger's light to his
chin, how the blackened wick of an addict's
tongue taps against her teeth as she hustles
and blags with a tawny daring. how pain
applies, and god is here in any given gleam.
a child's dilated eye delights in chocolate
money. the sally ann, faces chalky with
reproach, and each hoarse sin suspect within
an inch of a life. carols flattened to a german
oompah prosit! if i could disappear, braid all
of my mistakes to pattern, turn this penitent
attention to the work of love. but here is a thick
and extinguishing sky, devours its heavens
whole. sometimes the day is fixed to
the murderous hints of hardmen. consoled
and then oppressed in turn again, reeling
from that old trouble, that old coarse damage
turned our poets to grotesques. to inhabit
a cavernous virtue and rattle around alone
the unquiet attics of the mind, the mind
an abruptly blackened eye, the mind
a soiled mattress, bolt of calico, raised
hand bitten to seventeen stitches in fingerless
gloves. and a song, fatigued and luminous.
who mourns in lonely exile here, until –
until. crack the ugly glandular damp
of winter right apart, and all the skeleton
hyperboles of power. sometimes the day
is a gallows against gravity, to hang and not
to die, and buskers crooning yokel passions
making mock. until, until. to rise up
like a boxing hare, and the lyric steels
itself for meaning once again.