Algonquin twinned, windward we
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.-– Blackfoot
What will you remember:
This lifted light swaying through us,
The trees gathering, rooted in our patience
The golden and crimson leaves falling water-ward and the wind
tripping over itself, Dandy-ed drunken self
as we once one
Yellow and red-lunged and maple-hearted
Our love persistent as grass
Our longing as patient as those oaks surrounding, sentries lining the lake
We too, love
We too from teeth grew our ears, pinned by the words scribbled from branch
this sky of our life above blue and stitched together as a covering
Rivering and skyward, acorn hearts upending
In rivulets treilling--
If not, neither you nor us, nor any other
We billow, canopy of northern love, squirrels of light
Your breath as prayer
This lake our hermitage healed
This,
Thus we understood all, and at once,
endless.
the uncovering, in all, is worth the work awoken from all this.
Later, she turned the corner and headed toward me, wagging and prowling from the mouth of the shadows like a wolf who hadn’t gnawed on a bone in months, the rust in the door hinge that will not allow us to enter our cottage in the woods, the cotton you once ran threw over red clay, salted nuts and sweat-worn love,
All that, ...once returned.
A ghost in every incarnate, broken heart.
The shadow that gallops across the fields and through our breath, pirouetting
The murmuration of our hearts turn as the sun slows and falls as the days curtain,
Our winging selves:
The universe, the lining in your barked and broken palms,
Endless.
The door to the universe, water tapped and thumbed by rain
A drive through rain to spread wringwarf through autumnal sky,
Algonquin twinned, windward we.
May you long linger under blue fields of sky, rivering
She wrote in the northern pebbled sand, ringing out, aw
Your voice is what I recall best, and the way your fingers’ nails have grow, the way your feet sounded slight across the damp, verdant grass, the rattle of the planes above us one by one awkward andus and away, the cobalt sky, that Sunday evening I. October, timberlostcurving like candlelight and earth shaken. To shirk the obvious.
Who could have known we were fit for this?
What will you remember: and all the light
A father, a fisherman and a shadow death at sea.
A mother now. A named son after a lost-at-sea father.
She teaches the infant now to swim, and count his breaths in the water, bobbling.
What will you remember?
All the life gathering beneath the clouds and damp dirt and kisses on the swaying pond and the wings spread wide: once we were young and grew old together, like moss knotted in dance with blackened roots on the forest floor: our own palms and knicked knuckles.
We were endless, then
The cosmos spins ineluctably.
