In the End {a poem}

And what is there to remember?

How the irises thrust through the mud?

How their heads smelled in those moments
after birth when for an instant the portals
between earth and everything else opened
and something golden and indelible passed
through?

The things you’d have done differently
with so much more grace
and the dusty road to self-forgiveness?

How in the end, though you thought
forgetting was the thing you’d been schooled
never to do, it was also a form of kindness,
leaving in its wake only the whispers

of story, a menagerie of clouds,
and the possibility of presence
that, it turns out, is all we ever really had
to give?