Jeff Garrett

27

Each click of the shutter was like a single locust saying “there” and stopping the world.

I can gather fistfuls of seeing and show them to you in a book,
you don’t even have to know how to read to know just where I’ve been.
But on this side of the glass, this side of the river, this side of the flesh that is filling your hand, a whole family is looking for a new place to live.
They rearrange themselves from this day forward, each with a different view of the
runaway land.

And a Northwest Passage of my blood is about to be surveyed by one of their kind.

A link between lingam and heart—something we’ve always wondered about, frankly,
here in the Big White House of mind.
We wait for pictures to show us the blockages others have always assumed.

So much in the way of riches, but no way in or out.

What could never be taken from heart and mind has led us here alone
and we cannot wait for a mangled son to make this house our home.
But if we follow the broken river and put a new wall in,
Replace our time of constant luck with something like feeling wind.
Then maybe the family rounding the corner would find a larger kin
And the heart-rounded world that holds us up, sighing, could be our next best friend.