Echoes

Eddie Vedder on ukulele. Leaves coming down in slow motion. It's all coming down in slow motion now. Damp pine needles cushion each step and late alyssum blares a bracing whiteness against all this rust. My heart beating backwards. You, letting go of lakes and trestles and holding hands on the bridge. The sun briefly breaks through, barely leaving enough space for clouds to scud. But the world is paper now. Folding, tearing, reshaping into something smaller. He peers out of an empty house and he is no one but I am still she and she is wondering about She and she asks him, “if I tell you the name, you will let me barrel down the highway straight east into the sun that rises for you?”

For we echo, beloved. Our cries leave us to become something other because there is nothing here that requires us. No eyeless rock or earless tree. No hungry fox or exhausted bear. She knows that. She knows we've got it all wrong. Again. And there aren't any images left in which to confide because their bloodless portal only takes you back to where you began: moaning on your knees. The love of one woman is enough, even though you know not to whom you bow. You do not know.