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You Know the Place, the One Where


by Darryl Price



pages are crisply crackling without any help from 
you, waiting for the right winds with the 
right front teeth to finish the job. Every story 
is torn apart, at last, at least as soon as 
you give over your love. Why do we do 
it, retell the fable, rebuild the myth, restart
 
the argument, even when the days of hardly laughing 
together again are to be thrown completely into the 
singeing fire's falling down cave-mouth and lost in the dirt and ashes? 
The trees know something that is too sad 
to remember. And if I go deep enough, 
I know that same sorrow, too. Pages, like 

the bygone sails of great ships, sailing in 
the cupped hands of giant clouds, are not fooled 
by any calm moment between sea and sky. 
There is nothing more important than seizing a 
blank, beach-like break in the paragraphs of our 
lonely lives to sit down and make a 

little lively music, laying our heads back against 
all the billions of stars and dreaming of wildflowers,
something better somewhere. It's the only thing that 
keeps the glue stuck into the seams of 
the real and the silent potential of everything 
else to go on, but it's all inside  

your head. Still I'll whistle a funny little 
tune to myself, as if the mountains were 
not so obviously gathering each morning's dew for a crystalized 
beam-fed lover's lips to smile down upon us with. Every man 
does the same dance, because he is either 
killed or swept away from the doorstep to 

another eternity's bargaining bite. Even if he says 
he knows not how he will become the 
last dancer, who alone can perform that language 
of the one space where he himself has landed.
Little red dots turn out to be colonies
of starfish, their open eyes those of dragon constellations.
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