by Steve King
© 2011
All rights reserved
Words might come, sudden,
like summer lightning,
night already settled
too quiet for your ease.
Or find you as you wonder
at some new-found mood
intruding hard
in that instant
before sense takes its chance
to parse new questions
of trial and distinction,
aversion or desire.
Sudden, to outrace
the throes of their inception
and the occult context
of well-hidden thoughts.
Come sudden emergent
from a trove of dark perplexity
otherwise unknown:
a shadow flashed before you,
holding captive all your seeing;
tracing out the arc
of a dark epic gathered at large,
you a small part,
you, minor in the telling,
mute, awkward,
waiting in the crowded wings.
The word,
unfamiliar,
unwarranted,
unwilled;
soon to straddle
some tamer level of convention;
still middling strange,
even as it’s newness fades.
Word;
you take large happiness
when it satisfies
to tell of your small things;
grateful when you think you might control it;
believing you might use a word
to shield you from your terrors.
Imagining a difference
between words and summer lightning.
