by rosemarie dombrowski

The weeds have bloomed between hemispheres,
the dried leaf a crumpled wing,
the twig a hind limb paralyzed.
The silence of rocks crushing us like a vice—
the pestle to the mortar,
the porousness of anything
in the path of a natural disaster.

The face of the desert is a woman
or a man, a row of bamboo reeds
twinned together and singing
in tones of dust,
scorch-marks and the color of sand,
a coyote spirit drifting
between the columns, barely visible
from these coordinates,
like the chin hairs of an ancient god.

You are a mirror
bending light like an impression,
like the reflection of something
that never existed within the space
that you’re tracing with your finger,
something that adheres to the invisible
laws of physics,
A scaffolding.
Maybe something to live by.

The frayed nerves,
the natural world synaptic
like the brain before its collapse,
the colonies suffocating in the night,
the footprint over the mouth
as we measure its weight in metrics.
You should know by now
that breathing is the act of vanishing.

Cocoons of wonder and fibrous life,
the magic of air-thin stems
clinging to a root, a thought,
the root of a thought like an ecological truth,
a moment in which we defy
the laws of science,
the weighty predictions and pitfalls,
memories like tentacles reaching
back to the source,
what someone might call
the light of the firing mind.