Writing

‍

Pen-tip leaves a trail of death, tail of past tense,
twisting lines of already-attenuating thoughts, monument
only to itself, stories born having been already written,
no matter the blue of the ink. How deep the stream of
mortalities, the instantaneous fade of a flower
to an image, your eyes to twin ghosts who
oversee this chain of infinite extinctions. There’s
not much sun beneath the mulberry. The old rose
puts forth a single bloom, all it can muster
on this desolate plot, over which the branches
encroached, year by year, incremental darkening,
inevitable, written in the very root and tuber.
There’s history re-made in the telling, about
how we decided in a prior century to put it just
there, a wedding gift to flourish towards what we
called the future. I tell it to you now, write it in past lives
lined up, word by word, strung pearls on a thin thread.
I will buy another shovel at the hardware store
to replace the one that cracked last winter, dig
a new hole and move the bush, its thorns already
drawing blood, ink of absence, life.

‍