Phillip Garcia Poet Free verse

All Lost In the Fire

You will never know the language of 
lilac and lavender
carved from discarded countertop 
granite for you,

each symbolic crossing inching 
forward a leaden trail 
of footfalls grown heavy by distance 
measured from their genesis,

their sum, in whole, a silence slabbed 
like an obedient daughter 
at a Sunday supper suppressed by 
quarrelsome parents.

Yours only to last was my first ever 
endeavored, the poem,
which by any modest measure, 
measures my worst:

an orphaned sonnet left to incubate in 
fields forgotten
by memory lacking the oil we used to 
burn in worship of sun,

its dark riddled with murk-water 
wells forged from cobblestone 
and feigned acceptance of distant 
realities’ deep end look.

But you will never know which colors 
vanished 
the day that saw me leveled by 
imbalance swung by fire:

the braided flame that drew a hopeless 
breath to shorten
distance between life and death, home 
and without, me and you;

the empty sky where you once spotted 
a beautiful white heron 
as it floated above infinite ripples of 
love and liquid, like 

the smoke I inhaled to pick up this 
tattered page, burnt on 
the ground next to Ashbury, Oliver, & 
Keates, where I stood still

while I could still stand, holding the poem 
you promised never
to read - the poem I promised never to 
finish - defeated in words.

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