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Vases, originally uploaded by MilkaWay.
I hear you, crawling towards me, sitting in the grass behind the old house. It’s a place we go sometimes after it rains. When newness fails and feels unreal, we return to this place like home. Homecoming. Coming home. The windows are partially sealed with boards. A few glass panes sit in their frames leaning on a wall with fault lines as deep as the yawning ocean floor. I’m standing too close, and it feels like standing at the edge of a cliff. There’s further down to go in those gaps waiting and wanting to pull me in. The roof is hole punched and crumbling in large hunks of melting ice caps of plaster and soggy wood. Tree limbs bend and sway overhead, depositing crabapples and leaves in heaping mounds amassing molten hills of decay in the middle of what I imagine once was the living room floor. I move to meet you in the backyard. You’ve gone off somewhere, maybe up the hill to catch your shadow or some glint of green in the sun, or maybe you’ve walked down to your reflection in the slow moving water of the creek. I hear you crawling now, sneaking up to my shoulder. The grass folding under your palms and knees sounds like shhhhhh. So I stay quiet and think about words to expand every sound you make.
Please. Ease. Disease. Leaf. Leaves. Leave. We. Me. Heart. Beat. Breathe. Sea. See. Saw. Paw. Skin. Fall. Flaw. Foehn. Fray. Light. Leak. Lay. Stay. Hear. Here. Curve. Cradle. Cave. Quiet. Range. Away.
Your crawl slows and sound descends. Your fingers pluck at grass and I hear something that sounds like Away or possibly Okay if I tilt my ear to the wind a certain way. Before you reach me, I turn sideways and slip through the cleft in the last letter of the last word in the last sound you make.