The Dance of Decay

Where speckled shadows and white cinder sit 

splayed with spikes of pine,

a desert vine bobs with careless splendor

over a long and narrow gap in the ground.

Heat rises in ripples, parches lungs, 

drawing heavy breaths.

Sweat reduced to salty, cracked, white lines 

on furrowed foreheads.

The air urges those kettle-colored leaves 

across a sun-bleached sidewalk.

Skittering, rattling, dancing,

attempting to flee, to fly.

They wait on baited breath, on graceful cue,

to be swept skyward.

Wings forged of long forgotten feathers

and dull, dry flecks of earth.

A copper ribbon unfurls.

Trickles over the horizon.

Dips beneath the contours of the ground

with binding inevitability.

Below as above.

As above, so below.

Branded by the bargain,

the paradigm etched in bone.

The knowledge all at once precarious 

and achingly exquisite.

To wake within the dream.

To know, simultaneously,

both the breadth and the cost.

The gain and the loss.

To bathe in yellow sunlight.

Yet be bound by the soil.