Elements / Weathering Loss
by Emily Bowles
Awakenings
For Mike Seybert
You left behind a wake of words
like water running
away with your meaning—
a wake of words by those left
like Bishop’s keys or
Oliver’s geese circling
in your wake, the words betraying
not so much of you
as we wanted, wondered.
How your words awake in us a
wake of words, leaving
your meaning, migratory.
If I Fall on Your Trail
I wrote my name on my shoe
for you—or because
of you, that becausing
a becoming, not a pair,
not a man I knew you knew
anew, a new aloneing
this loss without finding:
I am afraid for you
I am afraid like you
of unknownness (no, you—)
Witchweeds
Everything I touch turns to you
as if in flowering a witchweed
which we
do not know how to grow
we
do not know how to grow
morning glories weeping willows
such anthropomorphizing seedings
ceding re-
ceding. What I mean is,
everything I touch turns into you
witchery when I realize
(I used to believe)
everything I touched,
I made made me
we
make each other without
knowing which flowers turn
to you, away from me—turn
into outto onto
a sun moon whitening,
a moon sun brightening
a withered face, lines unbending
hermystery.
Finfeathering
A mermaid flying frightens
me—frighteningly,
finfethering
toward failure
of magic, flighteningly freeing
freezing:
water unfit for sirensinging, so she
gasps for breath.
Water unfit for breathing, a lung
filling with the wrong elements,
and fins feathering,
into the squawkings
of a seagull shatterbird,
shatterborn, shatterburn
star star star
scales
scar scar scar
from a sharp shard
this shadowburdening
shadowburn shadowburden shadowbird
stranded in a whether unfit—weather,
for a birden, seegull, sea.