DAYNIGHT, WITH MOUNTAINS TIED INSIDE Poem by Alice Fulton

Chandelier too full of brilliance to be indolent.
Your prisms enunciate the light
and don't need rain to break it into rainbows.
Snow with six crutches in each crystal.
Your livery your glitter, your purring
made visible. Only inanimate things can sparkle
without sweat. My spinet, the threat of music
in its depths and miniature busts of men composers
carved of time on top. The hollow bench

held sheet music. Sing me
Charm Gets In Your Eyes. I hear you best
when undistracted by your body. In headspace
technology, where flowers are living
in glass globes, their fragrance vivisected.
Anything that blooms that long
will seem inanimate. Heaven. Grief
like the sea. Keeps going. Over the same wrought
ground. The whole spent moan. Praise dies

in my throat or in the spooky rift
between itself and its intended. Like a wish-
bone breaking. The little crutch inside
is not a toy. There is no night asylum.
A restless bed, a haunt preserve,
a blanket rough as sailcloth. But sing me, was it kind
snow sometimes? With true divided lights and nothing
flawed about it? If song goes wrong,
be dancerly. Dance me, at what point

does west turn to east as it spins?
I've never understood. Perspective.
How charm gets to yes. Dance me Exile
and the Queendom, by request.
It is a ferocious thing
to have your body as your instrument.
Glove over glove, let your dance express
what I've been creeping like a vein of sweat
through a vastness of.

This tune with mountains tied inside
and many silent letters
can be read as trackers scan the spaces
between toes and birders read the rustle
left by birds. As any mammal
in its private purr hole knows,
the little crutch inside
is not a crutch. More a sort of
steeple. Neither silver to be chased

nor gold to be beaten.
You were==you are
more than ever like that too.
Noon upon noon,
you customize this solitude
with spires
that want nothing from me
and rise with no objective
as everything does when happy.