Huh ...

Thought of the evening:

Vasili Arkhipov amd Stanislav Petrov (the latter of whom I knew of before tonight) are both credited with saving the world from nuclear war. (The former during '62, the latter during the 80s over a missile warning 'glitch'.) Who would be their American counterparts, if any?

For a novel

All you can do is break the world,
That's all you're good for, all you are
Cracks in the world, wholeness in me
Sunlight dancing on a frozen sea
What is it good for, failing so far:
all you can do is break the world.

The Perfect Angel

She flew more naked than the day she was born,
eyes wide and wounded with silent scars.
Angels formed in the snow, crude and misbegotten.
Her eyes burning she turned away
in a silent pain too deep for words
and blinked fiercely in denial
of denial and it seemed that the stars
blinked back, and laughed.

So she forgot, and people can forget:
that is Heaven.
She made one last angel in the pristine snow
because she could
and had nowhere to go.

They found her cold and smiling
and knew that she was gone.
They carried her home in silence
not knowing what she’d done.
They tramped over the perfect angel
that then melted in the sun.

Working on a novella

Tentatively titled 'Found', it's about a man, his family, and his accidental adoption of a hellhound. Which, thanks to poking at dog breeds on the 'net ,I have decided is 'mostly Bouvier'. It says much about me that I figured the dog needed to be a specific breed.

Stories

Our stories have a limit,
you said, soft, watching skies.
I waited, drawing words from you
with silence.

Follow any story long enough
and it's just a tragedy.
"Like heroes?" I ask, though
I am never sure I speak.

When our stories end, prayers begin.
We plead for exemption, from death.
I would have a story rather
than live forever, you added.

I listened to your voice, felt
the silence fill the emptiness
as if that was all we ever do.

Silent

It was a point of pride, dulled
with life's decay; pockets free of holes,
empty of tools. The deaf man
carried no paper, no pen, no pad
into the world of open-mouthed silence.
He knows their language but so few,
know his, not even the insults.

When he needs them, they appear
at a gesture, another magic of
a foreign world. Shabby but
sometimes a miracle, signs
like small gifts, offerings he takes
as hope for the world, swallowed
with a kind of nameless sadness.

This is Untitled

I project the inward out,
everything I offer you already have.
Our meshing a tangle of needs and wine.

Outside, rain sluices down windows
drops meet, merge, slow, but
they all seem to fall alone.

Inside we are too warm, our words
hot and heavy and I think of the desert:
to move, make such wondrous noises, but
not to change.

In cool sweat and tangled sheets
the rain loud over our breath, we find
smiles, yes, but no words to share,
not one.