Borage and runway
Borage
(for AJK.)
Right there in the farmer’s market,
between the peaches and the kefir,
you were crying all of a sudden.
You hadn’t shown me yet this face
but tears are shared by all of us.
So is the mucus, the inflamed eyes.
We’d almost drunk the whole jug
of borage tea sweetened with “deep
mountain maple syrup.” M took sips
but you and I were gulping it down,
two approaches towards sweetness
shared by all of us, even as they ignite
right there, as time’s bark splits open
and you take big, thirsty, breaths
of the volatile compounds, sap and wood,
pulls of the diaphragm analgesic
at first, but inflammatory in their fruit.
The label on the jug of borage tea
was wrapped in names of alkaloids,
“relax the heart,” “soothe the nerves,”
but did we drain it for its sweetness?
Our recompense, austere but nonetheless
frank, was the peated whiskey. Its smoke
had no such promise, it said “listen.”
--
Runway
(for AJK.)
Looking for something to solve
at any cost, the mind defers
its life from year to year
in search of a fitting runway.
“This will be the perfect place
to take off,” says the mind
until a rainstorm blows in
from the mountains. “I can’t fly
in this,” regrets the mind on a dime,
and to be fair, the lightning
had gotten quite intense. “I’ll wait
it out at least until it starts subsiding.”
Looking for something to figure out
about itself, the mind is flickering
its eyes from the waxing storm
to the stony, irregular, clearing.
“Lamps!” it cries, already seeing
futures where the ground is lit up
with vast arrays of halogen globes.
Right away, it sets to work on blueprints
while the storm is raging. To be fair,
they are impressive blueprints.
When lightning cracks, the runway is clear
from its tip to its tail, but “not yet.”