Excerpts from The Sky Will Overtake You
The Muse Finally Speaks
You don’t need me, she says.
The sky will overtake you—
a stunning event each time you step outside.
You do not have to call up the thousand configurations
of emptiness and cloud.
On its own, without the workings of your mind,
the sky will impart color and contour
to flatland, house, and hill.
Memory, imagination—they are nothing
compared to the sheer, simple fact of it:
the indelible, inviolate fact
of sky.
Earth
See how it falls, unhurried,
between your fingers,
leaving traces of itself in the creases—
wood and acid, flower and metal
in the crescents of the nails.
See how, when you dig in its darkness,
it settles its weight in your hand,
at home with its child,
and how, when you lay it back
around the newly planted roots,
patting it down with the flat of your palm,
it leaves you again,
without resisting,
the way hair, skin, sight, mind
go, quietly, cell by cell,
so gently you can only imagine
to what soft bed, what body
you are being delivered.
What Do You Have?
Not this earth, not even dust—
Not yours, caw invisible crows
like doors swinging shut
Not your memories, rising
and burning in the air
like leaf-dew in sun
Not your thoughts,
darting in and out
like hummingbirds in the blossoms
Only this bit of time,
like clouds unforming—
even as you point to it,
gone
© Marcia Lee Falk.