“Lines Written Before the Day Shift” by Michael McGriff

(2007)

Let me be the architect
in the glass city of your mouth,
the wild clock of your mouth
that spins backward: glass to sand,
sand to freshwater pearl.
Let me be the beekeeper, feather
merchant, knife thrower, soothsayer,
the savant of your mouth.
The farrier with tested theories
of wear and distance,
the shoeing of your mouth,
the alchemy of it, its horse-drawn wheel.
Let me hoist half a sugared lemon
to the slick roof.

Because the mouth moves us
from one unknowing to the next,
let me banish the charted course,
theory, and fine angles;
let no mechanical lily
take root in its soil;
let nothing be raised
to its palate—no pale words,
no anvil’s lust for iron, nor the hands of men.
Let nothing obscure the mystery
of the thumb-deep vault
of your open mouth
as you sleep under the dawn-flicker
of tea lights.

Let there be room enough
for the Weaver Maiden and Ox Driver
who lie shackled to polar banks
of the River of Heaven, where once a year
they cross those star-laced waters in your mouth
on a bridge of sparrows,
meet midway and lose themselves
wholly in each other like branches of wisteria.
Give me this star-tortured patience,
the yearning, this one night lived
and relived in the heavenly bodies
moving over the wings of your mouth.
One thimbleful of wet light
poured into another.

“The Cage” by David Gascoyne

(1932)

In the waking night
The forests have stopped growing
The shells are listening
The shadows in the pools turn grey
The pearls dissolve in the shadow
And I return to you

Your face is marked upon the clockface
My hands are beneath your hair
And if the time you mark sets free the birds
And if they fly away towards the forest
The hour will no longer be ours

Ours in the ornate birdcage
The brimming cup of water
The preface to the book
And all the clocks are ticking
All the dark rooms are moving
All the air’s nerves are bare

Once flown
The feathered hour will not return
And I shall have gone away.