It was the last flare out
I watched his hands mimic the affairs of the universe.
And fall out of the light of the fire.
Boot pressed up against a boulder.
As if he were holding it up.
It’s the sink and the rise that no one understands
It will end up feeling like a thought you had when you were younger.
Something worth leaving home for.
But we can’t know it until we’re in it.
Don’t think I’m past asking you to sing it
Sing it to the westerly wind and the waxing moon.
And we’ll wash our clothes in the river because it’s simple
We’ll navigate The Divide
A dry and muted moon shows her face in the mornings
Unaware of the difference between willing and telling.
But I could tell you the difference between waxing and waning.
How you can sense in which direction we are all moving.
Until the moon abandons a Wyoming sky on a subfreezing night
That this couldn’t be left to happenstance
The way the water wouldn’t glass over to show the stars
And when I talk about the stars,
I’ll mean the way they overlap and extend eternally
There’s a storm in the south east of the country
We wont know much more than that, really after the fact.
Wrapped in this wilderness where man cannot stay.
All the while the smoke is rising out of the forests of Montana
And I will forget most of my time here.
But I might, years later, recall a friend crying in the kitchen
When we’re waiting for the pot to boil.
Because she doesn’t have a reason as to why.
Or how the wind has never felt softer.
The two of us sitting eclipsed
By the river. Water carving rock.
The river so loud.
How at this time I was still lost.
In thought and in habit
And softly letting go in a rainstorm,
“This is okay, I am breathing still.”
How the sun will leave us,
Breaking over the canyons,
the mountains,
That still, after all this time,
Pushes up an expanse of lights
We know only the beginnings of