sky in november

this sky is a suspended blanket,
a garden of circular ash, restless
and hostile with its promise of cold
wet fruit, biting like frozen needles,
dispassionately rearranging foliar mosaics.
it is a wild animal left wandering,
ragged fur hanging like anticipation,
a fury of howling and hunger,
teeth running courses of salivary tongues
licking the scent of airs unleashed;
gray matter, dense and pitted with
pockmarks of sorrow, tumbles across heaven
dragging the skin with reluctant fire
scorching the sea, icy smooth and furious,
gluttonous and abandoned to her passion.
an impermanent sky hangs, hastened by aging water
and infected with a courseless wind,
sky of smoky quartz and transparency,
it is a bloody dream punctuated
by open wells of swelling waves,
swollen wings of water scattering salt,
dictating the art of a silent planet,
a picture of what lies hidden beneath mirrors.
one cannot die in this season,
without the proper language, one may not
depart these waters, it is impossible
to escape the tide of falling clouds, disintegrating seas,
aimless bird of death that nests
upon a faint hint of spring; the winter is
no place for the unwilling, for the hapless victim
of unwanted memories, it is impossible
for one to pass through this windy gate
without the purpose of a gardener,
not without the purpose of pruning
the branches of silent inversion,
those leaves that fall without landing,
those scattered remains of light
that have stayed behind, faded in musty corners,
closets and basements, crumbled in pockets
and stuffed into crowded drawers.
the sun is no longer happy here, it goes
to the place the moon vacated, where
midnight howls dark forests to life,
unspoken mystery gardens tilled with salt
and ashes, cold darkness,
dark and cold hiding in plain sight.
the sky is an overcoat of bitter cloth,
harsh and uncomfortable,
it seeks its way toward fitting, toward its own
perfect clinging, its complete coupling,
confronting the browned earth with its hands
full of frenzy, full of contemplative agony,
the sky trying to wear the sea
like a chalice of wine, trying to entice the land
to decorate herself with a heaven
littered with wet and windy leaves.
unrelenting and respectfully rude, the sky
speaks in horrific syllables, a vocal assault
coming forth shouting an obscene death,
promises of blood, decrees of density in drops,
like a bitter old man tangled by thorns
and thickets of precise prison walls,
the penitentiary wind, isolated and singular,
an immense wave descending, covering what time is left
to die fully, to completely leave the surf
behind, to totally forget the sea's name,
to find my own name, to die another day,
with a new name, a different bell, an umbrella
of thorn and rose, and with a golden hammer,
or silken coffin; dying like a cloud dies when it returns
the blue feather once again to the sky, after the sadness
passes into oblivion, after the tears and salt and
wave of winter have receded, after these and when
the winter swallows its personal medicine,
then this death will mirror the sky, faded gray
releasing the yellow seeds of blue magnetic storms.