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.