Writing Totems

….you have to become the person you need to become

to write that book.

                             Junot Diaz

 

Listless in the cool light

of afternoon, a lizard scans

the crevices along our wall

waiting for me to fetch

part of myself that’s a blend

of fence and skink

 

clinging to language’s strata

and burrowing under each crack

to find the hatched syllables

of a word. Then another and another

until a sentence leaps into place.

 

And on a drainpipe, a raven bangs

for recognition. Shaken leaflets

fall off the mimosa clustering

along her slick plumage. The Pleiades

sunlit in green. It’s time for shedding

( as Winter’s sister crispens the air)

 

and the bird baits me

to invoke part of myself

that arrives with risk, daring

to roost in the macabre rafters

of imagination.

 

Its beams splintered

and veiled with the intricacy

of spiders, the breath of characters

I have yet to raise from the dead.

____________________________________

“Fence” and “skink” are two kinds of lizards;; one clings to stone walls./fences. the other burrows under garden foliage for protection and to look for food.