David Dowell - "Dissolve"

Our next poem from our submissions comes from David Dowell. Enjoy!

Dissolve

The air is crisp with a cold that you’ve not gotten used to yet.

Leaves are raked, but not yet bagged.  It’s autumn-

So what?

The memory gets shorter, along with the days.

Sometimes, you think this isn’t all bad.

The sunset is wormwood flame but

You pass through a red cloud and out the other side

Untouched by anything but awe.  Try not to read too much

Into this.  Your mind is a flock of swallows

Skimming the waves in search of hatching flies.

Blows that used to bruise now draw blood

Seeping from wounds in paper-thin skin

Time soaking outward also through thick

Bandages doubled over and held tightly by a loving hand.

It begins to rain.

The rain evolves into sleet.  

You roll over into your sleep.  Startled by some strange incident in your dreams,

Your thoughts are flushed from cover like a covey of quail

Under the feet of some vague notion of god.

The fields are adrift.  The corn still stands, brittle and brown and

Rotting in the snow.  Listen-

There’s a deep quick quiet muscling deep into the earth.  It’s an unfathomable

Silence, rigid and pure like some holy law.  It makes one feel at peace, and

Yet still longing for sound, for the shock of joy as a murmur of starlings

Eclipse the sky.  The dawnscape stretches like a child

who’s slept in.  It’s naked and young.  

Eyes blink in disbelief.  It’s still dark, and a thin sliver of moon hangs

Like a hook on which to place the day.  Sometime later the grey

Sky will appear, tentative and cold and longing for blue.  Like dust from a beaten

Rug, the starlings of your dreams scatter through the air making their way to

Points unknown.

It’s not hard to imagine, that place to which you’re headed.

It’s warm and malleable, like the past, and yet you still find it

Difficult to comprehend, like an impossibly large pill made of hope and faith designed to

Dissolve once swallowed.  A pill designed to make us dream.  

This poem is a confession inked onto the skin of such a dream,

Is a book fluttering skyward to join that flock of gulls wheeling,

Letters falling like feathers, words swirling in the wind.