We wait.
We Do.
All born souls queue
Up to ascend where
Unknown certainty begins
And known uncertainty ends.
We sit.
In stillness our
Hair billowing, bodies
Skin covered in ripped sheets
The bark on eucalyptus trunks,
Bent from blow back towards
The earth, arched away from the sea
Arms outstretched
As if to grab something
That’s behind them
Like a runaway a dream
Or a lost child.
I think, “how limber”
Coats lined in misplaced trees
Searching the land
But not belonging on
This continent where
Their branches suffocate sparrows
Dead and flightless
Laying in the shade of their foreign leaves.
Let’s use up those tourist trees instead
Belonging in another hemisphere anyway.
Use them for pens and walls,
They deserve to die – not
Native redwoods and sequoias
Whose needle hair holds
Those human-sized
Fatted trunks where
Locked inside the bark
We saw off gifts worse than their bite.
We drink.
Clear cold words
Pouring down our throats.
Stopping to read
Unbound leaves of golden red-fire.
Our thirst
Like the trees
Sipping through tiny straws, the roots
Magic wells fill with rain in the sunlight.
The slight of branches
Trick the sap into the trunks turing it into life’s blood.
The ax wielded by
The mind thirsty still
For more fruit, more nectar
More magic.
We read.
Pulp fiction
Dedicated to the willow
Growing in the fringe
Of the yard where
Someone’s mother planted
Her husband or sister
And we see her from the rotted old wood swing
Moored like a ghost ship
Out of time, out of our sites.
We travel.
Returning from the east
Heading out to the desert, west
On the horizon where warmth sinks fast in winter.
The hour’s late and dinner’s cold, politely
I sit chattering, shivering very quietly with my hands on my lap
Like a good child
Quiet in my discomfort.
Never complaining
The chill in the house freezing any love
Out into the wilderness
Get lost or turned free.
Sudden and without announcement
The next book begins
The old book returns to the building on the hill.
Scoundrels sneaking away with a story or two.
We finish.
Bookends holding up
Our bodies on the shelf
Related to no one
Left to right.
Packed up and traded
To clear the way
Leaves fall, memories
Raked up and bagged
Hauled away.
Nicely mowed lawn,
Honey, dripping, life like hives in neat rows on streets called Elm, Pine, and Main.
Painted the color of Spring bulbs they pop
And remind you of
Someone you knew
Or a character
From a book
Once borrowed
Now, long overdue.