They danced out a midnight of taverns lifting tables and chairs with their teeth and balanced an arm’s length of saucers on the lip of a diamond-shoed mare

They carried their sons on their shoulders and wrecked all the rooms with the turquoise and crimson of crystal and waltzed with the fisherman’s widow on the bones of a pigeon

It was yesterday’s hour before the widow perceived in the bleached flame of candles they would weep in their slumber on doorsteps for the crippled ascendance of swallows and the sweetness of apples turned silver

Yesterday’s hour before their sons would awake to a critical Sunday of sorrows before their sons had gone soldiers and gone soldiers went shadow on a spent summer’s landscape and the substance and language of shapes

The sun-torn silence of roses they seek with a regalia of ribbons loosed on a morning of mountains and a construction of stilling encounters with their women gone nude to the river

Kae Quante