I

You remember me

and my tears

rain for the thickets branching under my feet.

You remember me

and my heaviness

presses flowers into paper beneath my

shifting weight.

Remember my voice

and the grove my music wove through to reach you –

 

Your drums gave heart beat to the forest between us.

Percussive brushwood with more

life than either of our lives together,

you remember that forest

and the outback jazz we wrote for it.

 

You remember, don’t you? –

the way the forest swayed for us,

Creaky oak trees careening to your beat, steady,

wind between their leaves whistling to my voice –

Nature had never heard such a saccharine noise.

 

If the brush could smile, it would have resembled you.

 

II

My tears rain for the thickets that bloomed under my feet,

and pay homage to the biting breeze shivering

the spines of trees –

freezing branches,

the splinters of our chests just barely

cohesive.

 

III

Music does not pacify my hands;

tea does not thaw the draft in my chest –

like you left the front door open during

wintertime –

frost crawling, stark against my still thoughts.

 

The metallic taste of loss,

permanence,

pooling against the walls of my mouth,

forming waves beside a silent tongue,

grows frigid.

 

Your screenplay lays

 

coffined in its purple folder

 

on my bookshelf

 

unread