I watch the insects carry the equivalent of all my small, human hours away into the oak tree’s shadows, its vast, blue emptiness scraped vulnerable by the various, inarticulable divinations heaven-wrought it is in my watching where I learn that all those long darknights oflonging are survivable, even the edifice’s steep climb embarrassed by the chaste stars, or faithless dreamers - I know because I, too, survived them: isolation’s weight, musky as those grief-lilies that wilted into rot, fragranting abandoned rooms with the raw crimson of russets reigned by the war that designed them desire is a name for it, yes? Hunger another. A small, half-held thought’s burden, it takes too much bravery. All of this takes too much bravery. And I am not very brave. Each decision I make, each word I say, everything is an echo backwards into my own skull’s cavernous ruin, run over by ants and all their tip tip tapping. There is no world that I know where home is not heavier than itself, an absence.
