Ruptured grasses creek to quickened days,
Spool on stony drains filling the distance -
Knots of glimmer while the vestiges wilt.
Violent echoes of life swept aside for life
Traced from memory. Make confession
Where the runoff was dug. Coalesce
Into something not unlike lightning.
Perennials take tutelage of death
Beside their needled emergence,
Air thread to sigils of great exodus.
Learn distinction from breath, evacuated
In shattered skin from the liminal
Plane across the waterline. Awareness
Comes suddenly, spun like coloured glass.
Powerful eyes ensouled so young,
So recently husked by the foot of August
Rewiring its range. Flocks begin to form.
Each of us takes forward that emptiness,
Overexposed, draped like a century
On vacant hands. Water and sky make
Sheer incoherencies of any origin,
Elements with dire recollections
Of falling staved in brief seasons of flight.
Ply the volts in your cells for second suns.
Mark the stars’ automaton in the thrum
Of synapses, foretelling the Orionids
In a lance, metallic and wraithlike,
Torn across my field of vision. Familiar
Strikes. Lensed like hearts. Plummeting, restless.
Light on the precipice before a white world.
