-All morning the house had been shaking,
quivering in the same way lungs collapse,
expand and collapse again, the small arteries
shivering against the force.
I stepped out.
I could not stand the violence. You remained.
Inside, underneath, holding to one of the door frames,
pretending the wooden rectangle hid you
from the sight of God. Pretending the quaking
was from some unknown force. With a shy smile,
wearing innocence as if it were yours and not,
as was the case, what you had stolen from
the neighborhood kids while they obliviously
rode their bicycles and played hopscotch
in the cul-de-sac, as you watched them
envying the freedom of their youth..
Amidst the shaking, you forced their expressions
onto your face. Each successively giving
to the force and violence of the quivering,
collapsing and shattering on the ground.
Around you, the broken bits of laughter, smiles
of childhood freedom and innocence. Our own
moments of affinity, long since pulverized,
sunken beneath the floor boards; their laughter
long since empty and having become one more
direction in the sweeping breeze of winter,
the vowels between us having lost their sense.
I watched.
The darkening of our moment, as the sky remain
a great expanse of blue, diffused little by shaking.
The leaves stirring about the dried lawn,
their graveyard at the foot of the house.
The resistance of the windows, to the pressure
of the heavens raining down, to their shattering.
The shivering of the barren branches of the trees;
their acknowledgement of presence revealed.
The flames of the rose bush bursting from a spark,
and the whisper of the wind to silence it.
My own shadow growing dark.
Dusk refused to fall, until the graveyard and
its corpses settled, until the trees returned
to stillness-their response to absence, and
the eaves of the house became unburdened
of the weight of heaven and sky.
By then, the embers of the rose had ignited.
The house became engulfed in a different form
of rapture, as you held, still, to the door frame;
your bare feet cut by the shards of childhood
shattered beneath them. It was then, into the ashes
I walked to save you, though I never could before.