knot

The crow perches at the foothills of the firmament, still atop the teetering cypress as the day gives way to dusk. The rest goes as rote, the muscle memory rituals, untended threads strewn all about. Clouds obscure the sky, crows and motors and the abstraction of appetites fill the air, breath by breath and from wing to flight. Oh but the light is leaving! Oh but my race is run! I keep time with the hoop of my tumbling heart. I work on the stitching, I let out more line. The smoke rises, the spirit runs through.

It is the dogs lying down with the leaves. It is the bouquet of rain gathered by the reaching earth. The twilight grays and old man blues crown the bounds and leaps past seeing, dusk getting in everything. The things you can’t say, the visions you can’t see. This flesh manifest in rumor and habit, the entity an average of spark and spit, a set of stacks and punctuations. The rest the shared breath, the vagrancy of matter, all this wanton wandering of joined hands amid the reel. You feel it and you know.

The night comes on and the ghost gives out. The closeness of smoke, the burden of breath. Abandoned to ash and ember, the flame lingers on. Life happens all at once. It goes on and on, shifting from foot to foot, wandering from root to crown. This is it— the light that you remember as the light is lost. This is it— the earth at your feet the wind on your skin. The iteration and the amplitude, the hustle or the hunt. Comes the rain, comes the snow here amid the come and go. The words as you turn them into what you are, this is it.