skeleton tree
// An archipelagos of isolated worlds that were complete and whole.
Events dropped from history, pulled from the light and were left hanging like
sheet paper -
The same as how a scream lingers on tiles,
Or a twisted face imprints a ghost before rounding a corner.
Full history of fictions and not-so’s.
Stories exhume sojourning truths:
A resolution doesn’t necessitate an ending,
So we start at the end.
Sometimes…
A reminder is the starting gun of grief’s marathon race in strobe lighting.
Details like door hammers on your newly sensitized being,
The knocks amplify in rooms of ash,
Jar the sensations of a contained body to induce sickness of glass against hard
surface.
A threat of smash.
Visible cracks.
Grief strikes, it returns, pauses, resumes.
Without care of situation or time.
Is transparency useless when splintered by glass lightning?
Body embalmed.
The body remembering experience before rest.
Empty palms preserving presence with the intangible ties of its antonym.
A two-way dream - a dual remembrance.
How can you hold onto something that does not hold onto you in return?
How do you stop the buoyancy of forgetting?
How can you bottle all those lost things?
Attempting to prop up a memory that was not so long ago an actuality, and
recreate a story that now seems so very potent.
Fill a blank space with light and sound and touch.
Rolling sentimentality.
Just come back,
Just stand upright,
Just reach your fingers.
All that energy met with collapse and the brutal softening of unanswerable
silence.
Then halfway through the detail of living the lights go out.
The door is closed to the outside.
Detail continues, details unfold - made of pace and grace inside a more intimate
space and
Without witness you continue.
In the darkness of absent eyes you work your way through a quiet catharsis.
Witness-less and complete in an unfinished moment,
One that reaches through the overwhelming positions of time.
Bones traverse as sounds of altered night-noise – restless cacophony giving
permission to calm.
Oppositional senses that are full, only in action, and lessened by words.
“A desert is winter contained”, you think,
Mocked by clarified representation of exhausted glands,
A returning image of reflection mimics your powerful contortion of sobs and
drying hands.
Skeleton tree planted in a pot by the door,
It grows each year,
Building body and memory.
Skeleton tree made from photo albums and piano keys.
Skeleton tree budding fruit, yearning leaves.
Skeleton tree grows tall and gives figs for us to eat.
Gives doves and ravens for us to meet.
By the door grows a Skeleton Tree. //