don't look back

My how the brambles rise, into the dead of the night. My how the briars entangle, that bare but beating heart. The moon swells, blunt and bloated among the clouds. The tide resolves these troubles with a life without love. The flesh feels taut, so full of bone and blood and feeling. The skin feels crisp, ready for the least wind to peel it away.

I shift on my feet, feeling each leaf and twig, the dross left awry, scattered upon the cast-offs of the earth. The dusk is gray shavings and clinging mist, touching my face with the ease of unstoppered time. Fragments of granite and quartz sunken into the mud, every rock a marker, every stone a story. Adrift of the leavings of light, the tailings of a day undone, old love litters given way to shreds and mulch. The storm lets loose a long sigh, tree limbs swaying, reaching for some buried depth of sky.

It was traffic and tail-lights. It was the cold dregs of the morning coffee. It was the belabored reasons of a wounded mind. These trimmings caught in that tide, the lively words and the bitter tongue. I read aloud to children, telling stories we all knew could not be true. I read aloud, words spilling like rivers. Words falling like rain.