#bombayuncut

we leave home for a place where beauty is more than an accident between a tree & its season. for mossed words, a grace of shadows.  

in the river, my meticulous swerve trimming the yaw of satinfin swarms. above me, you are a coddled promise, papillae

- silk before the compulsion of elegiac luster, its hauteur,

belled ghosts of // clouds imagined as the torn meanderings in white campion.

the morning comes willed in fierce cochineal. you remain still wrapped in yourself, still fluent with your own bounty;

euphoric as if a ciphering of oak galls. the worn tongue of taproots & temple vipers. under the skin, an intuition for what

concerns itself with the enduring, the unperfectedness. a call for ruminascence. to have sheered you from the leavening,

to have gored the bone from the most raven of ores. to frequent your dark rocks, their notched devotions crying : this, this, this.

i panther in your embattled forests. my blood the colour of floured jewels. wait for your emergence, your voice falling heir to its hoarse fluting -

wait for the rising of you -  shorn cocoon, shunned chrysalis. wait to sleep, coiled in the blackest etchings of your latent wings.