Let me proffer my goodbye’s alongside meadow flowers

Press them between vellum, squeeze slow and steady

Till all moisture is fruited into papyrus, dried remainder

An outline of time, time that is gone, never to be unwound

These flat facsimiles of things once heralded dear and precious

No more alive, growing wild in field, swayed by wind

Nor completely relegated to ghost, for ghosts do not possess

Enduring presence, each day rented out to lessen tightening pain

Whomever promised wounds heal without knifes memory?

Lies we tell aching hearts, memory, a sluced jam jar

Holding years of you and I; crumbs become stale martyr

Become voices in time’s veil, with perpetual tugging haunt

You lost your ring in high grass. I said; I’m scared, superstitious

Is this our dying? And looking me full in the face you promised

No. Nothing kills us. We are permanence incarnate

But—that was not, no deep needle of ink, smudge proof

I lay dried flowers behind glass and press weight gently, gently

The galvanizing of loss, a drowning on land, staring sky

From my place below earth: a heart can still

Beat. Beat. Beat

Even as you dry into a semblance of existing.

For, with no moisture—nothing grows.

I am alive without and within, there are only empty rooms

Each holds a memory of us, the glass may be dusty or cracked

Holding tilted portrait in askance, distinction blurred

Somewhere in this elipsing world, a folded musical note

Playing our photo album in slow swell, until rising tides

Swallow time and all we ever were, turning pressed paper

And dried flowers feining death

Warm

Again

With no recollection of themselves.