Stairs Made of Music, and: Hapless with Blazing Dazzle

Abstract

Stairs Made of Music The stairs in your house are stanzas. Your wings are nailed to your back while your dead father touches the nape of your neck with throbbing fingers. "Child," he murmurs, "breathe for me." But how can you be a child when there's a feather-bone in your womb while you walk through empty, lavender-scented rooms, looking out windows at stars hiding their damaged heads? Your mother, deaf to your cries, crouches in the attic. Your father's low voice also murmurs, "Child, walk up those infinite stanzas even though your wings are nailed to your back." While the moon shrinks into a fetal sac, your father turns into curls of smoke that fill your empty, lavender-scented rooms where the tissue faces of your children are pasted to the walls like damaged stars. [End Page 143] You stare at them like something vaguely familiar, familiar as infinite grief while your mother moves broken chairs like chess pieces in the attic. This much you know: the tissue faces of your children dream when told a bedtime story, emulation of star-buds emulate damaged wings unfurling. Hapless with Blazing Dazzle Let us find vestiges of myth, satin winding staircases & webbed shawls woven by nimble fingers. Let us not be split by the slight difference between day & night. Muttering about the years sinking into caves caving in, we search for a child by lamplight. Who will that child be? Who will help her blow out the candles on her birthday cake? Happy child! Hapless with blazing dazzle! She will help us to broadly open our arms: what's destroyed in an afternoon can take a lifetime to re-create with form, style & twigs that sprout roots. This being said, thus understood, let it be known that the road leads to a land where trees bear pears which bear the heavy notes of cellos.