for the Love of an Hourglass

THE THEREAFTER

Destiny wind

The wind that pushed me westward

Has fallen very still.

Is this to be my resting place,

With peace my ears to fill?

But what if I am lonely

Without my constant breeze?

"Your heart, my dear," it whispers still,

"Is free among the trees."

Faces

Isn't it strange how in the first few sunrise months of life

our faces look nothing as they do before mid-morning,

bleary-eyed and reaching forward from the small everything we knew?

Isn't it strange that some of us find our faces sooner

than our soft-clayed counterparts?

We showcase flashcards of all generations past in time-lapse,

until we settle into the present day and are born, of sorts.

I love that our bodies come round

to gravity's way of thinking and concede to the wisdom between her hands.

We write stories across our foreheads

and at the corners of our mouths.

Stories of all the erosion of tears and nights spent laughing by the fire.

(Here, these lines by my eyes are the trees in my childhood garden when they bloom,

the ones pressed between them, when they died each year and their leaves blanketed the ground.)

Our faces tell stories that turn our cheeks and necks to a map of riverbanks

and tunnels through the forest

and write the blueprint of our lives

that will never reincarnate.

I love that as we age the clay cracks,

and the roads so worn wear smooth,

that as the sun sets

the dwindling light illuminates our memories

in folds of flesh.

We see the babe underneath,

and know our face has had many faces

who changed the world and the world has changed,

but they have not changed at all.

When the chasm stares

Painless shards.

How they rattle and shake in my stomach,

like watching a leaf turn brown, fall, crumble,

wishing it could be saved.

Did I dream the time in between?

It stretches, reaching for my fingertips but never touches.

It shrinks back, shadowless,