Life Begot

Diminished, this.

Something dark and skeletal clinging to a whitewash wall ripples your skin with sudden cold.

We live somewhere between no place and so long, but we’ll go for answers anyway.

“Are you coming home?”

“What do you think?”

“You’ll be here.”

“In spirit, at least.”

We heard each other and we hurt each other and we can barely hear the difference. 

What is us? Most don’t have to enact this, but I’m moving across the plains this dusk and whispering to the team-huddled buffalo while bats like commas punctuate the clauses of tonight. A whole life sentence. An abundance of talent with no sure way to sell it.

You walk up onto the foreland, the ocean fronds astir below, like salt and lace, boom and hiss, and nothing happens or will ever happen even through the grim unwitnessed ruin of your ancestry.

Let me grip you and hold your switchskin body with my arms, oh precious one.

It takes so many increments to walk this road, the hedgerows and the cornbrakes slowly passing, sparse passersby, time a-waiting, hanging from a noonborn cry. A car comes by oh once in awhile, and the sun unfurls its blister arc above our heads and westbound, or northwestish, halfway hung upon a song, some hot and black diagonal thing. Hear it, hear the coyotes flinch then find each other days or weeks long since they split, and how their feral joy is tracings of contagion, chiming like fractured bells of wonder tolling their antic crimes in the piss-holy steam of this inferno canyon. The coming night. Things much dimmed. Yeah. Christ. The entirety of this.

You told me once you dreamed two worlds, two streams, two incomprehensibilities.

Riddle this: Why is all the world so red? This ultraviolence? 

“It’s not. It was with get that life begot. With dust that listen lost,” was all you said.

You want those words to mean a thing. Something dreamed and something proud. Make our motherloving life profound. 

The hardest thing to write about is silence.

_________

Image © Rebecca Loranger