strange comforts

a poem for you

---

i.
A curious momentum
is this inertia, the tightening
of my chest at the suggestion
of leaves, and the hollow points
where they have left.

ii.
You glide, your movement
less than linear, unafraid
of the dark edges of the woods.
You are always running toward things.

iii.
Another camper trundles
up the long hill, creaking.
A spattered line follows,
like the underbelly trail
of a copperhead
pressed into sand.

iv.
I lay open my wound to you,
the long and jagged line of it
a creek bed, my own gravity
pulling down water into sound.
I fear, always, that I have wasted your time.
But the opening of the bed
to air and sun required more of me
than I was willing to give.

v.
I cannot hear my children
but I know they are well
and away, down a winding trail
of locations uninspected,
as is right and good at their age.
At my age I scan the ground
for mushrooms, hoping
for the best.

vi.
Our dog has aged to the point
where she no longer sees or hears so well.
She used to bark at every movement,
to shiver during storms.
Now, she sleeps.

vii.
I slipped on the way here.
The rock walls are broken
and hold entire trees, and I slipped
on a piece of one of them,
a severed limb of stone set
carefully below its trunk. I was looking
at the defiant roots of a cedar.
I was listening to a thrush.

viii.
where were you
when I fell?
where I have always been.
where are you
now?
where I will always be.

ix.
Towards the end,
she lost her memory
and with it, her
grievances. Accumulated
as they were, all that was left
was simple earth and
kept seeds.

x.
The leaves are falling again,
lighting dichromatic (undersides and upsides)
into mattresses and mayhem.
Strange comfort, that leaves fall again.
The cat arrives late
and won’t come in.
He is proud of himself for this.

xi.
We wake before light
and walk in the dark,
stars above and gravel below.
We talk of nothing, we talk of everything,
we draw luminous lines
around our life.

xii.
you okay?
yes
I’m becoming okay

---