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.
Copyright © Phillip Garcia | Year Posted 2019
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