Audrey towns
Inside Out
Grief’s progenitor is a pencil propped against paper,
forged from a forest of felled trees
now foundation to their own inky image,
oriented between ontology of ocular and object,
an elegy in the stone ruins of accident,
not age, an Incan goddess in miniature, resting purposefully
in her shadowbox tomb, or knives nestled
on pegged nests snug against walls, their sharp divided
beaks tipped towards towering tanks that swallow sinuous figure eights and pelagic life
from some sunken far-off ocean. Perhaps lost love lives like the lively skeleton
in folk art tradition dancing motionless
near inverted memories, caught like wild fish frantic
for freedom, sunk at any moment in the deep, tethered to transparent
lines pulling at fragile folded lobes, clothes as worn and muddy
as the still, an amber fossil, untamed
beard nearly brushing subdued
saurian bodies wound around peeled-up paper that arranges the extinct
anatomy of an outstretched arm far from here.
Here, where the room breathes, one wonders if vines unravel
and slink out of the mind, entwined
with all that germinates wild nostalgic roots and aged
mementos, or if these relics seed scions of new
selves, warmer felt than light spilling in
through wide windows looking out.