keep

How long the trail of the day though the day is diminished, how bright that last stripe, that final spark. The world rolls over to warm its belly, the sky curls along the turn of its spine. Crows rise to fly to some distant roost, clouds scatter, aglow in the leaving light. The ordinary breeds with the ecstatic, and so we mark our passage. Day to day, month to month, year after shriveled year, we are marked and noted.

The limits of this dry skin arrive, prickly and abrupt. Hands abraded by rough sand and dry wind, fingers cut and stippled by needle and thorn, limbs burnt hot and tight by the summer sky. Arms hang loose, legs shift on their foundations. The flesh is buffeted by breeze and soil, weathered into the dead memory of these legions of lost days.

There is a dead man singing on the radio, wave after wave spreading his throat thin, rippling whispers across the stretch and loom of creation. There is a ghost afloat on the bandwidth of this mummified memory, a girl caught upon the cusp of a freshly changed mind. There are words stacked above this sentence, words descending down below. Eyes trawl over every exposed surface. Eyes sort every shine and spark. There are lies I long to tell you. There are promises freed that I can not help but keep.