(no subject)

Out back there was a mudslide transecting a waterfall in a hailstorm and all the autumn leaves were lost midair. The bottles discarded when the factory closed were rolling across the parking lot, hulked free from sodden cardboard near the door. They stopped in shoals at the ditch embankment, though some of the lastcomers' unimpeded speed shot them past through the gaps. When these hit the crest they had slowed so much that they seemed to be stopping to think, next half-circle sidled, escorting invisible stiles, and then end-over-ended or Keystone-carred down into flood. Impulsively we'd shed our clothes and ran about over the window shards. Some were ice-corns, some classical V-shivs, just one was intact, a deep sky-mimic shine of a square, save for Russian doll grins numbing grim toward a corner. Your dog and mine ran in circles and kept re-encountering, nuzzling, turn-tailing to madly escape, scrambling feet shooting glass hail and paving flakes noisily back among ours. Pink lightning struck that little treeclump island where I think you tied the boat, and then again, as though confirming it was dead. I knew from your posture you screamed it words back, but not what. Then the capper exploded.

When you left me I took your six letters down there and sunk them vertically into the brown exclamation point pools still persisting. Permit they fall like billboards where the shanghaied river minnows stuck in mazes of torn bottles all these many weeks have chased each others' shadows, own reflections, moon-fed dreams of nearby exit, or the nothing at the pinpoint of that inside-stretching tension that the children of another mother spun into a spine. Let self-forgetful smudges warn illiterate unthinkers that the lost love branch they're seeking ends in falls into a fighting flight from battles over whether drowning limbs should fight or flee.