soft light

a summer god eavesdrops in a dream that isn't his

the sequence is always
lurking on the tip
of my tongue:
vintage film that
tastes like bottom
-less honey
      mead.

three eight year olds hover on the front lines,
each in their own corner of forest. an older
boy throws his rusty longsword
with a frustrated, huffling yell into the
blackwater. a summer god doused in
sun dips an ear into the stratosphere
and listens through the trees, his
presence crawling through the dirt
as he watches the three children
fight lovingly against each
other.

three cousins draw a
treaty in the mud. they're unsure on
the details. their hunched forms
murmur against the sunset. they meet between
tree forts. they hate each other a little bit still,
though they're not entirely sure why. the sword
of the blackwater is a rusty pipe:
sleeping in liquid tar,
tangled in seagrass.

we finish our alliance written in mud.
fingers later smell of pine smoke
and homegrown moss.

three explorers linger on over
trembling planks of crimson
wood, peering through the
docks. they seek a longsword
made of backwoods and amethyst,
dozing somewhere in the murky water.

(even now
i don't think i
could pull it out).

valiantly
(like some kind
of fantasy novel)
we tiptoe across miry sand
and velvet rockweed. (small
fish probably sleep in it now).
we give up, and every summer
i scrutinize the cloudy water:
nothing there but sunfish
and unresolved tension.

before the war we swam beneath
the crimson planks and we were
mermaids, pirates, knights - all
at once and one at a time. the
years blend together and we
hate each other in different
ways. now we're so old (none
of us taller than the sword
still). we're never here at
the same time anymore,
and the summer god may not
have his ear to the earth
as he did so long
ago.

i hear three eight year olds
back at the docks, voices rising
from beneath warm obsidian.
there's yelling through a dense
thicket: we're screaming our
heads off - (they roll into the water,
turning into fish made of sunset
and memory). some summer god
somewhere rolls over in bed.
we listen in our daydreams
for another battle cry, galumphing
through shallows and ocean shores
until we surrender, making ourselves
forget about swords and tree forts
made of earth and twine.

yet i still hear three eight year olds
howling their heads off
somewhere in the back
of my mind, arguing in
sing-song voices
over who had won
the war.