Daniel Tutt

Every Day

Every day since you appeared
So vividly on my porch
When I awoke
Feeling cessated from my body
And that surge of clear adolescent energy lifted us
Up to the roof while I followed
Reaching for that point in my heart
You wouldn’t let me touch
For you had informed my body for the first time

Of intangibility

And how we sat
Smiling,
As that dim incandescent glow
Faded into the rain
And dark forests around you.

Every day since you haven’t allowed me to forget
Only momentarily do you show me your many faces
Sometimes etched along the skyline,
Opaque like a faint vision, you tickle my tired eyes

Or near our old parks you enrich color and texture
All of our spots and points my canvas
For these brilliant dreams of you and me
Sometimes sullen
Sometimes green
Each vision you bless with the most treasured gift
No lock/no key
All I have to do is see
The infinite possibilities
You left me.

Every day since you left I trace
All of our connections
Like intricate tributaries,
Ruined from a perennial rain

Each experience a tentacle
Scattered, isolated in alluvial flow
Now charting new ground
Unhinged and pouring
Outward like wicked fingers reaching

Forming spontaneous patterns, new shapes
After mundane dormancy how soon we find
These connections now firm
And beautifully fragmented

One time I thought these channels,
So worn and rutted
Revealed you nakedly, inert
For all to really see.
In that perfect design, my savior:
Nature has chose you to lead the awesome system
And has equipped you with the momentum of a collapsing hillside
To gently cover ourselves in that complex blanket
Until we gel in your omniscient design
Here together in this sad paradise

My eternal image of you,
Weaving the dry earth at the head of the rivers current,
Forging your destination ahead of the changeless followers
Propelled by some translucent storm,
My savior, my phantom

Summer River

There is that far away glow to the river the mild aridity
His heart in motion, gauged by the tired tread
Angels swam sadly outside that day
In an imagined ellipsis he felt them.
Through the material so artificial he would not have realized
It was all borrowed and that they all pretended to operate
Fluttering because they must have in thought
Yelling vicious epithets, borrowed from eternity
He still cast his thread into the tranquility of the past
Slaying the temperate façade,
His little community, a textual heaven
What he could not write was alive and coiled
Unfurled through the swift motions flow
Locked away there in the winds representing
The hearts trajectory gone and etheralized somewhere
Fixed like a pixel on the outer edges of that summer.