departure

The miracles we abide diminish as we take to the sky, the scars of highways, the wreaths of flickering lights. The voices narrow as our words cling to steel and glass. We rise and enter the anonymity of transience, another set of lights sliding across the night, another shape to blot and blur the stars. We pass above our insistent settlements, these beads of home and struggle and urgent traffic. We pass into charts and schedules, a people bound by direction. A tribe bound only by the skin in the game.

So you pass into the meat of memory. So you fade into a ghost in the veins. The thought of you a faded captive. A voice left out to ring in the rain. Another dream amid the calamity of passage. Coughs and elbows, all these strangers speaking at once. Another hope aloft as the world slips away.

This is all the rind of language, the moment held like a breath on the page. Another animal condensed into a set of symbols. Another voice left to mark some stranger's eyes. The place I was, the name I answered. The drift of days and limbs and sheets. The evidence gathered by my absence. The words that will fill the world I left.