What is a soul

A passenger from the childhood house The sheen on things under blue and the cool acreage of canary light has not a hint of crimson

till you drive me home with the idea of sky over the bay. Save tomorrow, the poster says,

from things that eat organs, things that multiply in vessels, cells skimming the venous and arterial

roads. (The careful knife under the skin prises, cleaving the old idea and the good)

Nanna can smell the rain coming; she scents the hunger of the soil. When my surfaces are raw

and ragged, like a tree shedding, I wander in memory. The past tastes bitter and lovely

(don't stitch me up too soon) the flame tree blooms blood in the childhood yard.

A mask slips. Forgiveness is neither random nor chosen. New rain yaps on the roof,

the wipers scatter recollection, intermittent with the light. Grace throws itself into my lap

and licks my face. When it lands on me, what can I do but laugh at once wary and delighted.

What is a soul? A soul quivers in the palm of your voice, is still when a sparrow alights

outside. In the winter sun a soul twitches neck and head, neck

buried in the pulse of a round & thinking flesh. Like any feathered thing in its space

it does not try to be noticed. A soul pauses to witness a magpie. Its body

is a lever, its beak a chisel, prising bark from the trunk of a myrtle. On the sky

a soul writes itself. Winter tosses a gauze across the single crescent

jewel that fades into day, watermark of the fingernail that lifted a scab. Then

the soul is a prayer may a great white egret lance your skies.

Blue Blue fades last. A parting turquoise flush on the leaves of paperbark.

Indigo strengthens and silhouettes resolve where the lucid becomes the deep. A newsprint

hue folds the walker into dusk but night fakes it — the stars are shy

above the extraversion of the city.