“Child of Adam, I fell ill and you visited Me not.”
Hadith Qudsi 18
I return to the garden on Wilce Ave with its great forked elm cut at the juncture. If this were a dream, it would mean paralysis.
Lie its shadowed veins along the drive and the story has one direction and the common daylilies crush beneath peach colored and such.
There is an ache in my jaw, stray light on your bedroom door. It is not well built and you will never see it herd the wild nova. You ask Whose hand is on the knob? My thin arms as wires, I wait for twilight and dismiss the idea (this unplanned mosaic a thousand times beloved).
I wanted to tell you I left a note hanging from the pear tree: please unbind in October in two years. But really I consider the garden lost. I consider writing just vanity: a long dark street with one blue hydrant.
My cracking hands malinger through the winter days and I imagine following a line of thief ants to the crags of the oldest tree outside your house until the cramp of my mind. The light source unclear but its shape, the constantly shifting points around a dark nucleus.
Consider a distance measured in black wires or one in buoys, their slow dissonant arcs of red over the water.
I disallow the memory of how you used to be. Not intentionally. But all I have left of you is an innate knowledge of gravity pulling you into the mattress.
The spectacle long days when twice the nameless creek became my nameless throat. And so the story has no end as eggshells resist decay in the garden with or without witness. A nocturne rounds in my mind. A great pulse that is neither mine, yours, but pushes blood in one direction.
Photo by Connor Ellsworth on Unsplash
