etude

The sun is out, so the birds will sing. They fly and fall as the sky expects. The bright and blue painted by the work of swift deft wings. These songs of flight written upon the empty air, the music of spring stitched upon the fall. My skin is warm here in this thin shade. The wind is gentle, feeling nothing but the change.

So like scales with words we practice. We speak aloud to conceal our thoughts. Secret songs and unsent letters. We fail our hearts for our naive statements. Falseness our duty before the law. The words stack up, hollow and pointed. The mood grows desolate despite the warmth and light. Like diagrams for grammar, or those shallow college papers, we bark and bray for the music we have lost.

Would that this were true there would be some small consolation. Would that it were so this obsolescence would wound a little less. We begin as dreams and end as erasure. The certainty measured only in the lapse it contains. Sometimes I lean on the bones of old love letters. Sometimes I lean out the window and gather up the wind. Some small grace the only thing I reach for, fingers straining through distance and depth. The empty air the most I ever capture. The words line up as the memory fades.