Poem: wings gather the milk by Haley Wooning

wings gather the milk

By Haley Wooning
QuailBellMagazine.com

​5.
​wings gather the milk

                      of moon’s pale brume

the mouth of distant waters

all night, I wait for language

to configure me


I am given a silence filled

          with apparitions


a meager, incandescent dawn

that never comes


exile

         shapes the heart of this night


darkness touches             darkness


the throat has to speak it


time,     numb time,  time

like wind over a dying field


impossible with being


the red silence drifts away,

I cannot keep it


guilt, faults that cannot be forgotten


I am unveiled, I am dressed in obscurity 


alone with my voices, and you, gone

born from a deeper thought, a labor

lost


it is impossible to describe this space -

absent, indigo, speaking nothing of the soul


sing  , it does not sing

but my lungs compose their song, speechless


how far              (I ask)                      the next-life ?


what worlds are lost

                                 between the branches

of an entombed sky?
 

the animals stand in the infinite night,

whitemouthed, arrowy, all that is without

language

                the darkness of a stillyet sea


who but us                     to sorrow the tree?


its loam to leaf, the dying wing


how much I asked of you, hands helplessly open,

how much you took from them


does it matter?


there is a field of violets flattened by the

dance of mares


I have tasted the expired breath, the wish made

 of tender distance, willows, wastewater, hours

ever uncertain           


who has buried me? nothing here is stirring,


in those bell-jar lilies, infinity


the delayed, latent love

the coarsening of the heart, still-hunting


forever night,  it is the time of starved things


rye spears the eye where the witch dares look,

the satyr walks with the mourned ash

                                  of a cloven hoof


gone the ships of my kin, the sea, this obscurity

that keeps no promise


lapping water, white sails luminous, the soon to be lost

and forgotten


will the indigo sea deny them?


she does not come, she does not return me