by elzebrook

January feels like March, in this odd heating world.
The sky has cracked and fallen on the rocks beneath me, a
Testament to a chicken’s honesty long ago
Or so it seems
Sitting in your arms, I feel like I can touch the neverending blueness spread before me
It’s reflection sad and broken on the water below, poking up rocks like ugly growths.
A frog jumps.
I can feel your life pulsing beneath your bark, trying so hard to tell me the things you didn’t before
I’m dying, you say. Except you don’t speak, a tree has no vocal chords, no lungs.
The words arrive in my head. It’s hard to translate and communicate to my feeble human understanding. I want to tell you to stop, not to try too hard.
I know, I say. I do, too. You were dying when I met you.
Dying when I first climbed into your arms and touched the sky.
Dying when first I loved you. I love you still, but…(always there’s a but…)
Love cannot stop death. It can only go through, to the other side.
Sing me a song, you say, cradling me closer.
I comply. I sing a song of journeys, of believing
Of finding one’s way through the dark.
My voice bounces off the rocks below, the canyon walls rising high above us both
Envious always of the clear, pure voices of the ones with bluer eyes and blonder hair, my fallen angel’s tones do not seem so out of place in this moment of mortality.
The song ends. You sigh. We sit.
I don’t know what I’ll do without you, old friend.
My fingers trace the fissures in your bark, the miniature gorges and valleys echoing the land around us.
I’ll visit your children, I promise, silently.
You laugh. We sit.
I have to go, I say. I give you a hug, press my lips to your rough skin.
Be at peace, I whisper close, so the wind cannot steal my words from you and drop them on some unsuspecting boulder.
Be at peace.

I leave. You sit, stretching your old branches toward the neverending blueness,
dying peacefully beneath the sun.