You are using an outdated browser.
Please upgrade your browser
and improve your visit to our site.
Skip Navigation

The Invention of Song

Not the face, the human face,

floating in its crippled spoon;

not the needle where it drinks

night after night; neither the watch,

the blood, nor the gold in hock,

the world liquefied to small bills

passed under the broker's jail;

no little crime of sweat that breaks

the child's lockbox of the body;

not the courage of the dour road

where it blisters into rough stone;

or the craze of the eye regarding

itself, the obsidian crystal;

not the mockery of the beast lung

bursting through its two blue doors;

or the shriek of birds glorified

with fear; not the pitch, the rock,

the ship of deaf sailors save one

lashed to his mast; not even the gash

of stars, the song, we are told,

too sweet to bear; but something

more, always more, the moon

in the wave, the animal, they say,

running in the Siren's veins,

the squall in the breach that calls

him out, mast or no mast, that grips

the buried shield of the sternum

as if it were the world's shield,

as if the heart dropped its massive

rope to hear, there, drowned in fog,

the sudden distance of its name.

By bruce bond; Sinjar Diarist; Devil's Advocates; The surest way to mapIraq's ethnic and sectarian fault lines is by how quickly a U.S.helicopter flies over them. Choppers race over Sunni areas, nearlysi