The only arts are music and loss
-erin
Theme and variation at the trees' edge,
singular waves lifting water and earth to the air
and the sun at peculiar angles that only crows know
or twilight crumbling from their branches --
I love a woman who will die,
not soon, please, but for sure.
I hide her death in my pocket
like a jackknife or songbird,
because she is a wave lifting earth and water,
an energy, a clean curve in time
more beautiful even than her body, the gorgeous debris
she carries for a while in the air. We saw the trees,
the breaks in cloud cover
that played afternoon light over the fields
like the danger of fingertips on a back,
on a lover's pulse. That night she cried,
knowing the impossibility
of keeping each tree in mind, each note shining on the trunks.
How beautiful our loss then, crest and breaking,
that beauty we would not choose.
