Syzwgy

2015      
     
Spring has adorned the cornflowers in their blue      
robes as it has done for hundreds of years. They line      
this road like the royal guard, parting only for drives,      
portals that begin and close behind people's lives      
where they are born to grow and grow to die.      
     
Young wheat, its adolescent chest billowing against      
tares is rising from the ground like mist. Tire      
ruts have sliced tracks between the colonies of crops      
and bordered wood; it's quiet except for an exodus      
of insects fleeing my desecrating steps.      
     
The drought, one month strong, is strangling      
growth. A plague of death beginning among      
villages of grass and will spread soon. Clouds,      
minuscule in thunderous powers, dwindle      
hopelessly as forgotten Zeus and Mount Olympus.        
     
I am careful where I step, grateful to the stillness      
that yields to my presence. I feel olden eyes    
of trees observing quietly as I make my way      
to the shadowed ledge. Air becomes thick with      
cypress and pine that escaped a logger's quest.      
     
Shade is brittle on the soles of my feet as water      
escapes the canteen across my lips. This is a holy      
place of sacred breath exploding from trunks through      
branches of confetti leaves. There's a drumbeat in the      
brush that pulls my aborigine into the dance of it.      
     
I resist the urge to undress but allow my memory      
to inhale ancient bone and blood of all that roamed      
decomposed within the earth. I ingest bombination      
of conduits from Mother trees to saplings passing        
prehistoric legacies to a new generation of growth.      
     
Shards of rock birthed from the mountain I now lean      
against curl themselves into the arched crevice      
between my toes and foot; I don shoes for the climb,      
loosened tendrils becoming a waterfall of sweat snaking      
from the peak of my head around the channel of my neck.      
     
At the top I'm thinking of someone I've never met      
living in a country I've never been penning words I know      
despite not having before seen. Thin metal fingers      
of cityscapes obstruct the landscape. I wrestle contents      
of my pack for a pen as an orange rolls over the cleft.      
       
I like my dirty hands cupping the ink and know this draft      
written on Bristol is destined, like all others, to become      
a grave under a burial ground of paint. My voice religiously      
sacrifices newly born prose to the universe for this      
heightened and privileged experience; it's all I had to gift.      
     
I would typically lie supine, honing rest before the home-      
ward trek, but today something was offered back. Some      
celestial alignment from the complacent dormancy I had      
become accustomed to in my quiet acceptance of this life,      
an unrealized absence from day to day existence: myself.      
     
It's all it had to gift;  
It's all I ever wanted from it.     
     
~