incidental

It’s not the sparrows in the feeder, it’s not the doves on the wing, it’s not the blue blazes sky and the wind woven pines casting some cool with their shadows, some respite for a sinner come a sunny day. It isn’t the tremble in the telling, or the foretold dogging its day, cracked pavement and each shadow soft to the touch. The words work the stretch of tense and the scope of scale, hand me downs and ne’er do wells, heavily laid in the stir and the steer. The drag of wish the straying breath, the whisper as a touch, so attuned to the trip and turn of the arc of the slow burn. The heft of the memory as I think it back alive. The spark of that kiss the moment it is mentioned. Here among the begrudged gods and the hapless magic, we arrive.

So it goes, this rigmarole. So it goes, the warmth lingering on the lips. A wild hare, a pursuit of prophecy pronounced off the cuff, the countdown to this hungry arrival. All the days of bleak ache and resonant empty, the terms of mitigation and emergence somewhere stirring in the shallow earth, root and rot and fungal emoting. The heart now knows, the head at last irrelevant, the gut ringing out its riotous assembly. The reasons lost, the spell unspoken, only the drawl of the dreaming between our struts and seams. A shape drawn, sand upon sand with the only tomorrow the return of the sea. Knowing of this fall, this frailty, and the drag of this covenant with the tongue. Hoping to share a taste.

Shards of pots and broken bottles, puzzle parts and context clues to add to the heap. Rusted swords and hidden bones, ancient sanctities observed in the barrow beneath the fertile fields. These golden hills once occupied, the witnessed struggle and strife surrendered to the turning earth. All this gilt once coveted, all these rites now rocks and names never said aloud. Not to be the declaration, lost in the ubiquity of creation, I return to ash and loam. Want and lack, the fool fumbling each loss. The long star sprawled empty, the symbol spattered page. All these inferences and apostasies feeding some fertile other, this bespoke flesh at last a worthy dirt. I return the words as they come, invisible down to the incidental.