Poem: Return to Empty

A palace among the dogwood and it trembles.

Beyond the tiger lily an ancient rock.

And its chiseled face bare.

We are ruptured. We are dislodged.

Memories captured, compressed in snow melt.

Sun pushing inward, water pushed toward earth.

Even on this day. Even in this breath.

I can feel this return. I can feel this lingering emptiness.

I feel as the long burn serves missive from the meadows.

A typography of flame reaches out to a withered parchment of skin.

Yes, today. Even today.

The core is blue and it is sustaining and we watch within as we dance through this summer.

Consider bends in light scraping gentian and valerian.

Consider the methodology of escape.

Talus and scree. Here. It’s here.

With survival breath accompanying sweat. And now. It’s now.

I am inhaling and exhaling. Be it too soon, we are still arriving through breath.

Around a corner: a plunge to reach a sacred bottom.

There are ruins beneath that bring more questions.

Aquatic trauma accompanying divinity.

It extends onward through the shallows, through the dusk.

Forever its linger. Forever I can hear it calling in rush and awe.

Liquid and its green signals and gray patterns.

Submerge meets emerge.

A single trillium withering purple and brown.

There is the glance backward. Memory’s zoom.

Back to the bounty and its precedent.

Back to the glacial, an Olympics poem.

Return, over shoulder’s creak and creek’s hush.

Stone array to elevate the difference.

Of difference. Of loss. Tales of those coming up onto the shores.

Clambering through climate and its migrants holding breaths, holding sighs.

Tiptoes through preservation. Pounces across ravaged remains.

Past stances of their former shadows.

When the movement settles, I dream.

I dream in old peaks and past voices. Echoes ongoing or spidery hallucinations.

Those whose bodies gave in and gave us their space.

Talismans of forgotten roads, paths, holding grounds.

I dream in ruinous life and the blanket of limbs in the ruins.

Barely hanging on, barely hearing, barely breathing as it spreads.

Smoke’s wisps rolling through the night.

Dawn’s facade a grimace and enough.

Pools of blood clotted in yellowing smoke light.

Pools of dried blood glyphic and perpetual.

The vicissitude within a warren. Alive.

Memories of moonlight dictation and commands of survival.

Morphing across realities we continue to open.

Opened eyes after twisted keys, pressing in and finding the next.

In this land of drought and my own ragged, wagging tongue,

dangling like a peace treaty around my chin,

I invite the reemerged in a mess of light.

I dream and I invite languages of breaking and mending.

More clusters, more shapes of us.

Birthing a glance of another sequence.

Come, join us until we crumble.