Our language is moving
toward the center of the earth,
urged by the wind,
the earth’s will.
Not an animal has moved,
since the first day it woke,
that wasn’t provoked
by its inner weather.
The outward, moving inward,
opens passages between worlds.
Every door in this house is open,
gaping into a beginning.
The silent isolated farms
are covered by a sea of haze
from a wildfire somewhere
to the west of town.
The smoke fills the world
the way the heiligenschein
of the woman who lived
in this house before me
inhabits my liver. I could sit
in the mechanic’s shop & listen
to the passerby’s stories
of hotwired boats & squandered
family fortune for hours
but the evening draws out
vulgar language from the calendar
peddler in the corner who knew
my father. Walking home I see
diseased faces wheezing
in the branches. On the porch
a spider lets herself down
from the eaves. She falls
like an ember in the dark
from the celibate woman
ranger’s watchtower.
People say after the farms
the town will be next to go.
I open the windows & mind
the whispers & breathing I hear outside.
Shannon Tate Jonas Poetry 