Poem-A-Day #110 : The Most Gentle of Destructions

The Most Gentle of Destructions

Smoke fills lungs - water - a sort of pool

You are a cave system

The roots of trees reach through the topsoil of your skin - there is not a violence in this it is the most gentle of destructions

Like a tree falling in a silent wood without a set of eyes on it - it is the crumbling face of the buildings resurrected in Pompeii

You are a three thousand year old visage - weathering

These languages against you are salts splitting their ways into your strata - they leave a snail trail behind them - they want you to follow their journey

The cracked open mountain - broken by dynamite and willpower - reveals a strange cake-like interior

Your layers are less complicated for sure - there were fewer lives involved - but they are just as interesting

What is this red thing your finger is on - where was it supposed to go -

A relief from the ancient city of Nimrud - a site destroyed by ISIS in 2015

Poem-A-Day #73 : ...the dead drift among all those words meant to explain the dead

...the dead drift among all those words meant to explain the dead

The acorn still wearing its beret sets itself on the shelf while the horse chestnut faces the other direction looking freshly living and full of layers of gold beneath the red-brown

Fingers on that surface - it is oiled - the pupil a stoic white is blind and cannot possibly understand the fashions of other tree seeds

These trees that will never tree hold the ghosts of dead women - they roll on the counter like those jumping beans you get at five and dimes from here to Amarillo

They came haunted - holding on to the yards they were found in - in them you see pronged leaves in that shade of green that only happens in July when the sun pulls through filaments of chlorophyll

Here there is a desire to crack open - to find that small tree within the black hole of un-birth - a sort of ur-lung - the egg before the chicken

A hammer would help - like popping the lid of a tomb - finding a room full of those Pompeii body casts - that exhibit in New York of preserved criminal remains refashioned as art

Would that the ghosts release - find some comfort in having their tiny homes engaged with the everything else - would that the ghosts find a rumble elsewhere

• The title is taken from Garden of the Fugitives by Matt Donovan

Source - Dionisvera/Shutterstock