Drawing Wind

The gray streaked with sun and sea green
runs between the children
inching into color
like the strings of kites they hold  --  
pulled from them
the tilt of a bird's flight,
and maybe sky, and ocean too;
threading through every pore, and follicle
enough to remember as the momentum slows
the contours and angles
as their hands continue to move
after the mind has since let go,

and they wonder without knowing
why they too can't just skid across the shoals
torn and tangled in their own frames;
and be stored away so neatly a memory
as to be seen again as they always were.



The mottled streak of sun and sea green
runs between the children
like strings of kites
bobbing at their uneven lengths;
pulled from them
the tilt
of ocean and sand
for the sake of all angles
of motion; as they tug
on the flight of a bird
so that at any point in time
still connected to the moment
the wind remembers
as the momentum slows,
and the hands continue to move
after the mind has calved, and caved
in its moments,

and isn't so durable
as to skid across the shoals
torn and tangled in its frame
to be found so neatly a memory,
and seen as it always was.



   * * * * * * * *


The Seasons, Broken


The colors of fall are a kind of warmth,
a kindling for roads
safely contained in parallels of piles  --  a  
showcase I can run my finger down
knowing how the sun had scanned me,
registered how often I pore over the contents
of a desk or drawer, tap a snow globe;

it can rupture too, leaving the recesses of the mind
like rows of rooms ransacked  --  
the floors in us always wide to scatter,
ceilings high to flood. Can make
a lover a vandal as cushions flip,
and furniture is searched and strewn.

I walk into the most heavily looted places sometimes,
vistas emerging behind a fallen tendril.
Your words wear away like karst ground,
all of them
gone with the distant echoes of thunder
as I have forgotten when green stops being green,
and the local tree is a constant  --
those pillars that always remain.
And I wonder whether things like keys or phones
are ever truly lost, or if the propensity to lose
is a season, or you yourself a seed supplanted,
or that I can carry you anywhere.

Bird's Eye

I hover over a country
so sun-faded it has turned to grayscale;
the roof of a train swimming in its shadows
all a part of the tree-top, and bramble now
as the train sinks, as the pavement sinks  --
the sidewalk, buildings,  
this whole idea of us.  

I couldn't imagine any such discernable shadows
in the huddles of forests
as leaf folded after leaf,
and glades bedded brush.

Smooth down a road, a lot
and add another dimension;

I will fly into it as they fly into you
transposing themselves onto you
with the same weight
as lead lodged inside shearing new chambers,
puncturing soft walls
as if it takes forever for time and place to catch up,
put blood where blood goes, floods where floods go.