Blue and black

This hurts me more than it hurts you.

Treason. A lie! I dare not say it aloud and
suffer the wrath of three tragic centimeters:
your head cocked to the side. Or your
sigh of stable-muck disgust. Or the
wretched, colossal
what do you know?

What do you know?
Rejoice: You will eventually
set down your stones,
sad soldiers. You will stop
looking back over your
squared, sullen shoulders.
You will march on.

I have yet to learn that skill.
The gleaming crows tell me I
never will as they flirt mean
and low over my windshield.

No feathers. No blood, good.
Dodged something, for a change.
The crows leave me for a field,
startling a jackrabbit into the brush.
I want to follow him, leaps and
bounds, but I must do what I must.
Heaps and boundaries. First.

What do I do with these stones?
Yours and yours and yours. Encores.
I bow, wearing my skirt of old sorrow,
to gather rocks, pebbles, twigs. It is
not desire or whim that compels
this odd gathering of this and that.
It is an act of prayer.
I crouch. I bend. I reach.
I scrape my fingers through the dirt.
For you, for you, for you, and for you.

You don’t hear me as I bless, atone, yearn.
I hope the lowest clouds and the slowest
trains will. Maybe they will take my offerings,
the strange piles that shift of their own
accord as soon as I take my hands from them.

I wish to stand tall again. I have been
whispering into the earth at my feet for
what seems like years times stars.
I would like to sing a hymn of my own making,
up past the skeptical crows, past the treetops
with their lofty, philosophical leafings.

It is late. I hear strains of happiness in the
blue and black distance. The crows are
asleep. I look around. No one. I hum a
few bars of this happiness, as pebbles
rain down through my open fingers.