The InditeCircle

Things I carry

I saw rays once swimming in the water
floating free of gravity
they never knew its pull.
Showers in the desert, all those stars
falling, and it was cold and your breath steamed
as you tipped your head upwards
to see.
Spill them, these memories, spill them all
out and let the wind carry them like leaves.
No setting suns or waterfalls, no gardens in summer
bloom. It’s the gray days I carry --
the sky of hammered steel and a single arch of birds
moving over the leafless trees.
It’s the Maine shore in December and the wind
over the cornstalks and how the windows are alight,
I can see them from the road.
The wreaths are frozen and the asters brown
and I carry them.
The rain hitting the rooftiles and the skater’s blade
against the ice, edging circles and curves,
because that’s all it can do.
I carry these things, the wild man we saw
walking barefoot in the desert and how
he looked beyond us like a prophet.
The rain and the snow and the solitary birds
and the wishbone they make,
I carry all these things and let them go.

Storms Gather

Storms gather in your eye,
gather and recede and forgetting
blooms in the space they leave.
Every day now you sleep
without closing your eyes,
those wide and deep black oceans,
moving against the pull of some strange moon,
and still I know
your face and wait for you
to wake.
Electrical charges is all we are,
bridging those dark spaces,
and when they fade like stars,
when they fail like all stars must,
collapsing inward and breaking
into their elements,
all you remember and ever knew
it breaks, too, and falls away.
Colors give and fade,
bright orange and red turn
sepia and cells become
molecules and molecules
atoms, and we give ourselves
to these chemical thieves, these robbers
of graves, of the living and the dead.
And still I take your hand, your still living hand,
and I whisper to you,
Remember.