Ashes are not Dead

I'm a moth on a one-way street.
Our shadows and patterns have been laid bare in the light.
Now there is nothing left to say.
And like scar tissue built and layered over itself, I feel less.
Less than?

Not enough rain falling into the mouth of June.
Grasses begin to stiffen and rustle like snake's forked-tongued secret in your ear.
Flowers contract in order to tend to inner devotions.
Blue jays have even retreated into some kind of muted blue haze.
Drought has a sound like everything else.

A rafter of jakes and jennies cross 40th avenue with their mother and it occurs to me that I might not have ever seen turkeys with their babies before now. How odd that they too live in suburbia. And how odd that I live here too. I pick at the back of my earring, clipping it on and off it's post as a way of trading the rhythm of how I got here for how I might go.

In the end, what does any of that matter?
I fall instantly as ash from a flame I never saw coming.
In the charred dream, I lie down next to a determined river to sleep for 1,000 years, waking to learn that I have become a fish.
No longer a night pilgrim, I swim into rippled sunlight with the ability to jump into breathlessness whenever I choose.
Whether moth or fish, ashes are not dead, beloved.