Tuesday, December 26
AS IF WHATEVER IS LEAVING / IS THE PRAYER WE'VE BEEN MEANING TO COME TO It might be that I’ve been wrong about the crow & that power line that wears it now. That gone child in the pink feathers of a magnolia tree, discovered after a party by the lake last night. The particular loneliness I’ve become accustomed to calling prayer—the last room one enters not to leave, perhaps. The edge of some dream one will carry to the end of a life but not be able to enter. The sky, another unbearable thing. How long must we look for what will outlast us when the sky is above, a single mistaken flame? Like that child. I keep coming back to the child when my heart is aimless. When there is little to do but hunt my own ruin in grasses that shatter at the base of the willow tree that grows into the lake. I remember being young & how I loved someone. That love has become something else now. Its tenderness broken. Its brokenness, tender. Wherein, there are feathers fleeing the sky tonight. Thieving this dark from memory. I’ve mistaken beauty for direction from this acre of unknowing. Might we move toward each other, rather than away. Even in death. Might any movement mean this night & the next are the only afterlife. I can’t help but think that I am arriving at myself whenever I wake. (Chelsea Dingman) Originally published in Beloit Poetry Journal