Diamond Life: Poems

by Landon Manucci

The cursive was wordy only the countesses understood. Countless versions of the letters piled and ran through the office in blotted rubies of red ink on waves of curly black, tacking them up. Even on the hall's walls. Our job was to read and connect the discrepancies. Every afternoon, no matter how hard we worked, the sun dipped through the blinds and splashed everyone in gold, an interesting invite of a color, the light that meant a coming rest, the end of a singular day, the patient existence of this light but how even that went away for awhile and so did we, inwardly begging for quiet.With half the equipment necessary, there we were again. We had dreamed and exhaled into a smaller space, sweating, even under the softened lamps. We had been given a new set of information, and we must sit now and digest it's round and oily gristles. Other operations might focus on leather straps or the containment of rats but some like us work endlessly on these unreal abstractions. We like the canted light on our lined notebook pages, the smell of those fresh lilies brought in from some Husband, mingling with the coffee maker, the sound of the printer, the hum of the heater with us mostly quietly typing and not talking, no whispered jokes, no aroma of leisure. This is what is real and true about our work.The city beyond us, that bunching of blacks against the horizon, most of us at the end of the day will head into it's dark rooms with colored lights abrading our fresh wine goblets. I am also one of these. Our living arrangements are beyond talking about. The drugs we take are necessary for survival. What makes its way into the country down into the valley is in the sagebrush buds that we want to believe are data just like everything else. The rabbit and the reason for the car. The dawn and the walking toward the hills. The deep sensual feeling of dusk actually does something to us. If ever the hand wanted a touch of taste, the amount of honey in the color of the noon, the shadows of leaves sheltered the children gently by the creek. I was moved by this because it made me forget all I was thinking. After the week there was nothing to do but live and rest but even those felt strange and foreign. The children seem to remember how. After ice creams, comfortingly patting the packed shoulders of men.As if we were searching through our minds for thoughts we found through low hanging palm fronds the sounds of these salacious and slappy creeks. Days seem longer without you inside of them, and though I wandered out of the creek's dam and found the reservoir you loved and the French word for holding you, I found the days still double and dream into jade and feldspar pools of water, mirroring all that is inside and around as you searched for it's running to an end but it did not end. It kept going instead in cool vast tours of air, even though there was peace in that void, so much weight in its invisibility. At the end of the walk more valleys and riverbanks and distant towns with smoke rising in wispy curls, arroyos cleared away by summer floodwaters wrathful enough to grind and necessitate the life around it. All that remained of the water were sterling silver rivulets of water, like thin snakes running from the glare of the sun.So many times she looked into my eyes the way cranes die and fall out of their windblown world. They land somewhere in a shaded backwoods space, where only a lonely owl cry lives and now the carcass of the crane that looks like a sodden and forgotten wedding dress. In many ways, the sign for rain was always a slumbering dog. The sign for snow was an alighting white lark. The acreage of indoor condensed conifer stems and pine smells comforted the shadows into restful black armies bringing night, bunching into black mourning doves of memory, more rain, welcome rain, and distant thunderclaps that stirred the civets from their stoops. we gotta keep it one hundred all the time ya'll.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1973365782
• ISBN13: 9781973365785
• Release Date: November 2017
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 28 Pages
• Weight: 0.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.1" x 5.0"