Some of the dead keep growing old with us.
They watch us breathing green light after a storm, playing word games none of us wins,
paying dues in a strange currency that fell under the sea.
The loneliness was too painful to own in those inner rooms larger than intimacy,
windows swollen with a summer that didn’t matter.
Surgeries left inner scars.
The mountain erased itself during conversations not critical to stepping forward to a new view of a sunset that didn’t need us.
You were too metaphysically tired to want anything.
The old woman dropped all her medication, and the blue moon didn’t write back.
The wind braided itself with leaves and light; emerald dresses of angels quivering against September sky.
Cars hugged roads that may or may night be winterized.
The teenage girl in a wheelchair, before dreams lifted, could fly.
An old man transposed childhood.
The birds had been thirsty all day.
The heat, a less important character than time.
You needed to find your way back to the dream under the sink to tell the girl you couldn’t go with her.
Someone might need you.
Someone might decorate night with your absurd dreaming.
The dead say it’s not too much.
It’s not a case of addiction to melancholy.
The answer was under the boat.
The questions were soft tentacles tethered to no one’s watch.
You watch for someone who knows you, who folds the map to your location on the tired grid, faded rivers.
Planets are whispering to stars.
The birds are leaving.
If it’s not enough, maybe wait a day.
Maybe stay until Tuesday.
When the rain becomes us.
When rivers dream new fish and mountains.