The Language of Waiting

—for Cat Bright

Across the city of Prague, the evaporated words of saints
mingle with crumbs of ruined sandstone, forming
the slurry of an unvoiced alphabet, one residing
not in the tour guides’ storybook spiels
but underneath an executive’s recitation
of U2 lyrics while trapped in traffic.

In a studio in Nashville, a sound engineer
sips her second cup of coffee while the guys on guitars
argue over what’s missing from the song they just recorded.
So many people don’t realize what they want until
they hear for themselves who they aren’t,
and oh, she’s seen how hard they try
to leapfrog over the distance between
what they yearn to say and what can hold true

and while she has the command of marvelous tools
with which she can make six people sound
like a chorus of twenty seraphim, and a live horn sway
to a dead man’s shufflebeats, she cannot conjure
silken rabbits out of ten-gallon sow’s ears. But

now and then she also encounters
psalms of hoarse grace, their cadences gray
with the grit of Time’s soot. And within the right light,
she’s witnessed how gray can shine
as a weary, honest silver. She lives for this:
she won’t hear it today, but two days from now,
she’ll forward a track to a friend in Prague
with the subject line “I think you’ll like this”

and on the third playthrough (stuck on Jecna
ten minutes and counting), the executive will begin
to improvise a descant, Czech consonants
glinting against the Tennessee vowels
like a flutter of thorns upon a drowsy river.

**

Fuel

On my kitchen floor, I sketched a chapel
with lines of flour. I stepped inside to pray:
I burn to utter words that will matter
as much as fresh water and daily bread –
phrases as precious as heirlooms. Lord,
grant me the key to your trove of magic straw,
your fount of coded numbers. I yearn
to glow as a honey of blood-warm hope.

The answer rose as a steam that stretched
me into a shell — a crust about to crack.
Fool, it crooned, why do you seek the gilt
of unread parchment and coddled china?
I did not create you to be as an urn
or constellation. There’s nothing you can spin
or stew into immortality’s gold.
Not books, not bone, neither brick nor marble –
none of the gifts you crave will outwit time
or outrace fire. When will you learn
my image is both the blossom and the ruin?
You are the vine that can strangle stone
and also the broom to sweep up the crumbs
of disregarded walls, and also the furnace
whose flames turn worn-out tools into ashes
that feed the dust from which new vines may spring.

**

Sonic Crochet Hook

The socks I complete, they leap
whole empires in a single bound.
I untangle herds of sheep on starless nights,
composing fluffy cloaks of sleep
that double as rafter-padding,
fish-sacks, shrouds. My owners
have used me to sketch the lines
they wanted to etch between meals,
measures, realms. One almost-monster
angled my lip to rip open ripe lemons
and then wielded me as a stylus,
etching invisible death warrants
underneath coal-lettered lists.

Absorbing nothing, I chain together threads
of conspiracies and skeins of consensus,
repair the aging strands of burdened nets.
Best of all? I slide through would-be screens.
No one looks twice at the woman carrying me:
looking once, they readily deem her
frumpy, old-fashioned, and harmless,
and she lets them think they’re right
and I continue to shape new-colored dimensions,
following not the vanes of lords or masters
but the direction of her fingertips.