Radiance

On the hill a man inside the ribs of a half-built house, that man
waving to me inside my half-built house, both of us on ladders, once
long ago. Good morning, he shouts that spring, as if from a dream,
only the ping, ping, ping of nails struck. Why do I remember it? The future
waxing for each of us putting in doors, windows, and skylights. Scent
of wet lumber drying in sunlight, as if ready to bloom as we open
something too big to see, and then the slow wind—furniture, kids, cats,
dogs, graduations, reunions—this puzzle each of us makes but can’t quite
see the missing pieces spawned, or what later will be willed away. And what
of that radiance pouring through windows, blotching the walls at dusk
as I lift a daughter onto my lap, a daughter who will lift her daughter
while steadying my chair. Where’s the hammer I dropped to find in the parish
of grass a bird’s skull? —Its small balloon blown from bone wherein I glimpse snow,
spring greening, and others who will come, touching names carved in stone pooling light.

We

As if all our lives we are writing one sentence
whose letters begin large and become smaller and smaller.
My sentence begins in the mountains after a snowstorm
where I am using my entire body to form each letter
through the drifting snow. Others are watching
from the valley. We are all on our hands and knees,
squinting at the preposition “toward” near the sentence’s
end. We are touching the windward vowels and broken remains
of consonants. We are on our hands and knees, crawling
through the sopping mud and snow-pocked earth. We
are trying to make out the last word, feasting like animals on its tall grass.

— Mark Irwin

Illustration by Nancy Hope.

In our ECO LIT series, Red Canary Magazine dedicates space for established writers and emerging voices to imagine better ways of being.