Resignation and Denouncement
The mystery unsolves us;
clouds clear for meteors,
and a love I used to know
breathes wide, fearless and
vulnerable to recollection,
habitual motion, to rockets
and falling rocks soon lost
to the sun.
Greens fill the foreground,
the valleys to the south
fill with low clouds, the wind
picks up, picks me up, and I arrive
with you now, or then, morning-eyed
between rock walls and drop offs,
seams of coal that line the cliff face
in the same way the limestone showed burns
in the church where we met, St Mary
of the Mount, cathedral in the sky
over stadiums that fill the evening
with new noise and blue lights
Then somewhere between this mountain
and the next that matters to me,
between a city and a clean ridgeline
some river unwinds, a forest untangles,
the earth flattens out and we can see
a whole gas tank away. The past too, unravels
into mural, and you are there
across none of it—a beginning and an end
without a true story in between, no matter
the strokes, half glances, at writing it—
they are ghosts in the highlands,
skeletons in the rivers,
the weather's gotten warmer
and the dead have grown dimmer
with my memories of you between skylines
and hollows I traverse, confused
or undecided, or confused about how
to tie this up nicely, this finished dream,
this elegance in the darkness,
a narrative created maybe for this moment—
years taken out of context
and understanding—to be better than in love
with someone half unreal, to become
not lonely, to not be made sense of
in the first place or any place at all,
to welcome back this familiar void
and to become myself and no one else again.