Jonathan Humphrey

Music for The Light Perched On a Chainsaw

It begins with sound. The workers sawing through some two hundred years of the neighbor's sycamore. Spent oil scent. Dust in folds of skin. Now the patchwork of light is shifting on the lawn. The limbs come down on ropes, find stricter measure, and are piled. I hold up a glass of water and stare through, bending and distorting what is already bent and distorted. All of these watery forms. The clouds. The leaves. The eyes. The sweat. Again their light shifts. Dust in folds of skin. The world is burning.

heat shimmer
white hydrangea
conjures the past