Assembling the Spirit

The spirit can spread open again, in a circus of heat.
Assembling at night with the rhythm
of gathering and eating within a known circle
(like a folk song, a well-worn idiom).
I can feel it pull away from the cold lake
and start to relish the delicate force of the light.

The moths tap the glass, the sky a brushed velvet
dropped over them.
It folds and relaxes as a muscle of water,
and arrives at horizon's mouth like a dark
banked knot of grit.

The paper-white window frames a lantern of play
and occassional stops;
In this, stillness thickens.
The slow end of glass, a sound pulled as thin
as elastic
camouflaged as silence.

My hands wrap and grip, pull and push
slide and trace the contours of fiber and grain.
Each pulse is a brilliant world.
I measure and ladle with processional calm;
converting whispers to touches.
Bright lemons, nubbed olives lash like thorns
from their brine -
plucked and speaking.

The spirit puckers and throbs in this.
The mantle of purpose glows heavily down
and insists - come forth, come fully forth,
spring forth into heat.