Everything backlit with meaning

Time Will Be Heavy

Time will be heavier tomorrow. Yesterday it was not
so much as a lark’s coat, but lighter than it was today.
Each day adds a little more weight and the anchor in
my blood penetrates bone and breath heaves chain.

My life unfolds in subtitles again. I go to the window
for no reason. A star might fall out of the sky or a
sparrowhawk pierce the undergrowth for what it wants.
Or the town far below might simply shimmer madness
as wind makes it dance jeweled against the eye. Everything
is backlit with meaning. More people I know have died.
Jim and Carl and Diane and Walt and Stan, yet poor Alfredo
languishes at the threshold and won’t push open the door.



Every day the Earth loses ballast as time grows broader in
chronolithic mass. Dream camouflages day with phytoweather.
I’ve not drowned in the well of a woman for some time now,
yet the sky remains undiminished by my desire to do so.
One has nothing to do with the other save to remind that
time in the past is lighter than it is at dawn as it gathers
valence and matter, the invisible conspiracies of atoms in
shapes left unformed by dear Mercutio’s mouthing of them.

There were days of cracked pecans, sails dipped in bright
chanterelle, the vinted blush of a girl’s corked cheeks as she
birthed fusion from a winter candle. There are horses set
loose in a gabled house, wandering as nativity stars unable
to dispel their necessary shadows. Doubt takes shape like
smoke amid brittle skins of fire. I play strings and they
tell me things I cannot repeat, swear me to secret all they
would reveal about midnights without number, time without
the cumbersome debt of all the mornings of the world.

Joseph Gallo
December 3, 2007