David’s Poem
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