rush

The dusk arrives in the usual vestments, the service quick, and the congregation either absent or unmoved. The sky is swaddled in the color of storms, the reaching sun and the huddled clouds. The wind slides a riot through leaf and limb, the trees all swaying along with the chorus, the cold a choir rising from the dirt and weeds. Eyes like spring and eyes like mud staring so hard, trying to see the reasons for heaven.

I arise on the wake of each falling, coarse with ache and the bruisings of a careless life. I cave into the rise of the sky and the spill of this world always tumbling down. I claim my ordination with scuffed steps and puffs of wicked smoke, the tremblings of error and of age a kind of rattled dance.The flicker in the ashes, the brief glimmer in the stars. These tides animate and obfuscate, each breath drawn across this fraught tangle of rags and roots, the bowed note so deep and true. These day wrecked with weight and dreams.

The wind grows cold as the lights go out, the world reduced to slips of bright windows and slabs of crawling walls. I am still save for curling smoke, my heart a stitch I make through the world, my eyes the seams along the broad periphery. I wait while the animals aggregate, arising as if by whim from the night. Each breath an escape, every word vain sacrifice. The world hurries on its way.