Ron Czerwien

R o n   C z e r w i e n

H E L P F U L   G L I M P S E S   I N T O   T H E   F U T U R E

I.

You are operating a brand new

proposition of self-glorification

when the failure of the breaks

impresses the distance.

Startled birds fly, with strings

attached to their cries,

toward the far corners of your

self-portrait in stained glass.

II.

The night is long and the forest seems

to go on forever. Finally the lights

that signify the presence of others.

This is not the first time you have

given blood, but it is the longest.

The last employee is about to turn

off the lights and lock the door

to the blood bank. You attempt

to speak, to lift your right hand

in a plea. A breeze circles above

the treetops, shivers the leaves,

then settles like a nesting bird.

III.

In your dream the ant is the one

holding the magnifying glass.

In the park your dog is burying

another citizen.

You wake to discover the wind is blowing

from a previously unknown direction.

Soon this town will be yours.

IV

Your ears are unpaved roads

to an interior world

horse-drawn air

is easier to contemplate.

Reflections from a distant lakeside

race back to their origins;

are you among them? How many

times did you open your mouth

and an ordinary dove flew out?

V.

A spoon stirs the clouds,

strikes a high note.

Right now

pirates are more popular than cowboys.

Somewhere

someone is making a funny face

to amuse a future child-molester

or, maybe, a saint.

According to the people ahead of you

this line has never moved.

VI.

A dog is barking in the distance.

You do not like to be kissed

on the tip of your nose

while you are in the middle

of your golf swing so you

drown the campfire and descend

from the clouds to the lake’s edge,

a stray growling in your stomach.

VII.

You are tempted to tug on the loose thread

dangling from the moon, but instead

you shrink the horizon line to a dot and fold up

your map of fog and whispers. There are no detours

and no stopping this train. You are the air

the last bullet parts and rides, the missing end

at the end of the line a blind man draws

with the tip of his cane on a microchip of light

carefully removed from a child’s laugh, then implanted

beneath layers of birdsong, using mirrors

and a feather once removed from the mouth

your pillow impatiently waits to use again.

VIII.

Tarnished by decades of neglect

the surface of your once favorite

swimming hole is too dull to reflect

the body of a child who cannon-balled

through nets of summers or

your winter face before it dissolves

like a pill in rain.

IX.

You are glad to be traveling alone,

weightless and free as ash in the wind.

The cause of the blaze is a mystery

dating back to the first days of cunning.

There are ballets composed of delicate

ruptures, planets sucked into buttonholes.

Now all you need for your journey is a hat

fashioned out of fish bones and laughter.

X.

In the boneyard of the constellations

a fat opossum moon noses through the dark

corners of one too many mysteries;

at the end of a hallway you approach

a shut door with a candle in one hand,

the tail of your nightshirt absurdly long.