Messengers Falling to Our Aid

By Betsy Sholl

Sometimes everything dazzles--broken glass
on the river bank, rain dimpling the sand.
But aren't there days you'd gladly slip like a dime

through the silver slats of the boardwalk
and dissolve in the pastel froth the tide swirls?
That's why, when noonlight suddenly obliterates

the surface of every leaf, we need a voice to linger
in our minds, whispering let go, or go on,
need lip-shaped window smudges where something

invisible has kissed us. Wind turning our clothes
inside out, coffee making a stranger's breath familiar--
clearly, not all messengers pour out vials

of destruction or braid glass chips into a saint's
leather belt. Some must be sent to teeter
on the edge of a smoke-filled room, watching

color spatter as the wheel revolves and light
plucks the fine grooves of a guitar's steel strings.
Were they supposed to tell us something?

It's all mixed up now with the singer's breath
deep in the mike, her lowered head,
hair falling over a half-whispered rasp,

collapse of ice cubes in an untouched glass,
a match scrape's millisecond of nothing,
and then--the blue birth of flame.