This is how your letter finds me, as beaten and bowed as nature allows. This is how your letter finds me, a little lighter on the metaphor. The yellowed, the deft hand fading with the ink, the parsed telling of art and tender. The name a shine, a shell, a weight pressed against its absence in the air. Icon and invocation, fetish and ember, the kindling living makes of memory. An act like all acts inspired and unsustainable, faith and ache and bone and regret, a face fitted into the framework of my mind. Time keeps counting after you’re counted out.

A sea of blue, a sea of green, the ink dark moon and the owl and the pussycat in the flood of echo and allusion. The rhetoric in pitch and key, the bag of tricks lousy with allegory and apostrophe, taking on the meter of smoke and the skin of the sky. Staring at up at the puzzle pieces cut by the reach and riot of bud and branch, the cold wind scolding deep within the fundamental forces of breath and perspective, the drumming of the body beneath the cacophony of its business answering away without question. I think I spoke aloud. I think the words weren’t mine.

So the sky sways, so the earth departs. The ancient masonry shifts and sheds, the fortress of strength built upon shifting sands take Ozymandias and labyrinth alike, the song left without singers. The predictable jolt of the odds catching up, the drawn out dwindle having limits nonetheless. The name fades with the ones who knew who it meant, dust and mementos, tchotchkes and drizzles of workaday words. The name is left with the ones that changed it on the way, the details of how this who from that other lost in the weary distance, the attrition of so much lost while traveling alone.