Lingering

Though brushed, as steel is brushed, not with color but cleaned of it,
still there are lingers.  Fruits of warp and weave withhold and blend, leaving
sanded tree knots in wood, where branches formed and fell, where polished
surface pulled the blades and brushes smoothing it away from intention and
into reality.  As usual.

Unintended whorls are cracking backs in frost, and are making brittle bridges
and not remembering how to connect effect and cause, or how amends are
made, or the chemical components of an apology, or a clash averted.

With the tendency of engines to break down, and memories to leak out into
inconvenient vernal pools and flood the pistons of thought until bubbling
and churning they go dead, or turn strange, or phase away into fantasies
and intentions again.  And damned reality will never conform or rebel but just
insists on being over and over again.  And it will not stop.

Mothers with wombs now withered try always
to nurture and succour and give more and also reclaim that succour and take more
and balance their lives and work and lose or gain enough or wait for each child
to see reason and rejoin the machinists union.

Where lines are measured and marked.
Where the engines are maintained and mastered.
Where in the vernal pools are water wheels and that power thrums through each bridge sprint, and though planks fall and the sugar builders scatter in a wreckage wake, it is still possible to cross, and remember what's forgotten in the frost and brushing and burnish and polish and all that smooths and sours with time.

Carrying

Carrying hunger and empty engines pushing
air with pistons, pushing them without a breath
of gas. There are currents churning without a spark
there are heavy breaths, belabored, bursting in ugly
choruses together, in rhythms staccato and otherwise.

Catalogue this heaving vocabulary:
Structure it into words of rhythm, and their sounds
into words with meaning, heavy meaning that looms
or just forget how meaning is made and throw away
the territory.

Hunger for the cannon fire, and its cracked report.

Or just a bit of moving air.