And your village shingles untethered flown to dust sifting the ruin of cities. Sleep pleasures skin sky your last memory beyond the photos in your car. Damp jade grass first crimson then crisped then nothing. Gone bedrooms kitchen tables deserts of bedframes and remember white cotton sheets and damp bath towels on the floor. Streets to ash pit your eyes, dust of your abstinent mouth speaks for itself no notion left of your own open throat silent in its instant of closing. How will you unplanted not sleep not laugh not breathe the now hours and tomorrow? Staggering toward stars…

A poem…to take you there.

After laying hot the morning astride the whitewashed bowl of the salted pool balancing the emerald sea beside we left our naked shadows in the noonday hours our breasts too pale to stay so long. The sun burned our turning skin like razors splaying fruits. From Blue Harbour we climb ‘round the jungled edge sliced with green slashing blades of palm and fern painted drench of reds blooming between tangled vines belayed on poles of knuckled bamboo. Sun dogs float above the path sectioned from the wild by fragments of limey marl walls. Cut light…

Our cousin’s attic smelled like hot
ripped timbers, brittle and dry after all the years
it had perched there, spilling dust,
balanced high atop its narrow Victorian house
like a huge hat you could play in.

Beside the steep stairwell a bed,
metal springs creaked and squashed if you jumped
or rolled over the ticking to the middle,
in the dark pushing and pulling, all hands,
sweat, and dirty feet.

Peas in the pod of overnights endlessly together.
Lights out we cuddled and listened for spooks
that might snatch us like nets. …

Her voice lands on my hearing
straight as rain plugs prismed lawns in a windless drench

She speaks detached, simple wisdom
trailing diction behind her heritage

Sings soulful secrets sown by girls of every age —
fertile epics buried in muddy tropic bloodlines, needled into long blue veins

Sweaty dreams dampen white linen pillows
women sit balanced in the boughs above her

She stitches ballads plain, without profusion, without foolery
speaking long sounds like tall white columns defining the shaded portico

In every poem a milkweed pod bursts memories
plants native healing herbs in her lies, in each wet wound

…

Wow...this is so insightful and wonderful...thank you.

And the forest floor
she told me before she died
is intoxicating reality
and I’d never heard that before
I’d never bent over and sniffed
under wet leaves up close like that
I didn’t know what she meant.

Then I moved from suburban housing and a job in America’s most dangerous capitol its bull’s eye really curbing my own parking space counting dollars on the third floor my building with a park, though hauling my wooden box of crayons under one arm papers and pens in a bag scissors and glue and hung my hammock with a chop wood carry…

I walk into the woods to cast prayers for you, you beyond the realm of form. Embracing indigenous ritual, I divine living dirt unearth a hollowed space. It leads me to you dying in your sleep. Tears, like fast erosion, swallow my intentions. I hear the earthworms making waste beneath a rock’s resting side. Curious witnesses watch. Emptied, I kneel in dead leaves digging with my hands to clear the perfect place to place your prayersticks. You are fixed now beneath the chant of river melodies. Suck the finished wind in, hold humid air beside my unstrung heart then forget…

very nice....sweet, too. memories, too.