post lament

A swathe of crows sweeps across the dusk. The cat dashes across the yard. Snarls and snips and columns of dust. Clouds trail messages after the wind. Root to branch and back again. Memory slowly dries along these lines. Soon the telling is all the time that is left. Soon the measure might as well be a million miles. There are no soldiers left out here. Everything gets left behind.

Solace comes in with the tide, comfort riding on the unsettled sky, gull and crow arrive to untie the dawn. The cool breeze a set of loosed bones, dancing across these unladen skins. Another day, and then another. The whole deal set out like funhouse mirrors. The whole deal made so long ago everything is bound by law. The cause and the reflection. The litany of labels, the ziggurat of stacked chairs and crowded shelves.

The world wakes up to another sleepless night. The sun lingers on reserve while the sky bucks and rollicks. Children make their way back to school, always saddened by the exodus from the heart of summer. All those bright hopes hung from pegs in the coat room. All those true loves stuck basking golden in the sun. The rest of it work and circumstance, the tree limbs swaying out above the bandstand. The rest of it the flavor of a shed lament, long and gray and ashen upon the tongue. A tale told, believing always in the bounty of further tomorrows. A tale told to the flocks and swarms, after the masses already lost. Yet another, all I say. Yet another is enough.