Warm Cider

She’s recording names from bogged beings, borrowing together some species of a story, stealing all rank, title, means, from grave markers and, although alone, the suggestion of another snatches her, under a wounded lamppost’s shadow, under which slender fingers crack, limbs quake, peers up, stupid girl, and again down, sodden shoulders, dripping lips, brow furrowed. That’s what they like about her, a weight carried, of a neat thing she’s a sallow version. She then hangs against gates, which guard a concrete throne, and there’s never, ever been a more educational excursion, and ah, how bent her blister of a notebook, ah, how muddy the knees, muddier the mind, how unturned the keys of each sanguine shrine. This sodden thing, it smells something else, is drawn, stretched like her pounds toward cinnamon fumes, inside, oak rooms, impassioned, loud folk. A chap offers her the handle of a cup, afloat is a single clove. She sits on a seat of flushed mauve and drinks. Ah, how far away morningside sonata seems now. Good, she thinks, indubitably, she thinks. Away goes the noise for the sodden muster’s poise and the warm cider, the foreign brew, almost warmed her.