That was how the spirit left the scene,
with one feathered wing dipped in the ashen sea.
The moment becomes a window,
the photo an eternity to gaze through
silhouettes
becoming signs, rippling to find
where the child once stood,
so that the saddened would be assured,
as they gathered along the shore
beneath oak and behind shades,
that this was how he made the transition.
The next phase of the journey,
no longer earth bound,
contours cast off and scattered to the deep,
commingling than expanding
to include these wings
and all the moments that are arresting.
We can find you when heavy clouds accumulate,
as the light that breaks through the sorrow,
as the wisdom that all is temporal.
The ways and the means we mill over
must appear smaller from up there,
ant-like and in miniature.
The shadows that surround
can levitate from the ground
when the sun moves them,
when all the white homes
appear like a runway of bones for those in flight,
passing with flashing talons
to penetrate the dreams of those inside.
Clear as the glint in your eyes,
I remember the whole trajectory,
as you cross the sky like an Egyptian deity
with one feathered wing dipped in the ashen sea.
Up north the family cottage grows cold.
The once glowing furnace of the potbellied stove
emits no smoke from its chimney beneath the trees.
Yet the floors still creak
and something beyond the elements speak at the edges,
with the spring of your essences.
It moves beneath everything,
even when no one is listening.
The sound of cracked ice on the lake
reminds me that the ancestors will take
the surroundings given and speak through them,
moving the pine’s limbs to shadowbox with the wind,
they make themselves known, if only briefly,
outside the pages of that great mystery
unread in the cobwebbed dust of your library.
Our lives are the layers in the walls they built,
slivers of glass in the windows and lamps they fastened
another stitch in the tapestry,
that which completes me, speaks through me,
through the imagination, peering from a darkened sky,
projecting light on the pillows of the dream’s eye
like a moon wrapped in sheets of cloud
on a winter’s night.
I hear you most clearly in the quiet hours
before anyone wakes,
when the lake would ripple its way to the pier
and two loons draped in mist would appear,
skimming the water’s gaze
over the length of the great Birch,
they’ll materialize and search
through my guise, at once familiar
in white tunic and shoes of leather,
they’ll come dressed in feathers,
dipping one wing in the surfaces of memory,
moving what preceded me,
deconstructing but giving breath to me,
an extension, their living entity,
poised between worlds.
yakskinpocketnotes 