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Sounds:
Dar Williams, The End of the Summer
Words: Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates
I'm no heroine
least not last time I checked
I'm too easy to roll over
I'm too easy to wreck
I just write about what I should have done
I just sing that I wish I could say...
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in excelsis
On a dead night he met
the white-winged woman,
shrouded and shuttered,
following her shadow in
the gloom of gaslight,
absorbed in her reflection
half-lit in the glass.
He showed her a way home;
she, moving her wings, sighed.
"I have to stay." The words
in her mouth, her vibrating
throat, the hands fluttering
uselessly. The intentions
shot away from her, ricocheted,
lost in the damp dark.
Blind with longing, she reaches
for him, meeting only air
and the rain and a whisper
that might have been a chance missed.
She flaps in her own net, tears
those snowy wings, draws water and
finally blood from her skin. Leaving
her wings behind, two enormous cups glowing,
she walks on, bleeding. But when she
calls that she is ready,
the same silence answers her:
there is nothing left. She has taken
too long. Her blood is useless,
the doors all barred against her.
And whispering from her, her breath
demonstrates what it is to die human.
Live in pain, and die quiet; this
is the meaning of her tears, the stifled
need, the hope lighting nothing more
than stark buildings, wet streets.
annotation for in excelsis
and for the 18th:
clinging
I have missed it again--
some signal, from a place
very like far away, the
meaning indecipherable at
distance. I need forgiveness
but instead ask for time.
This time, I will prove the
intention behind the act.
This time, I will admit
to need, to imperfection,
hold my flaws up to be
inspected, expose my
uncertainty, my passion,
my trade winds, my semaphores.
I am working to make
my heart transparent.
Expose it to scorn and see
if something, anything, might
grow through this fence.
I don't know what the signal means,
and I am here to ask you
where the balance point hides.
annotation for clinging
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