By: Paul Ilechko
Various
They met at various times
for some version of various
meaning perhaps derived from
“variety” or just a scattering
a dance across the decades
pulling in and pushing out
finding and losing in various ways
as if they could see through time
knowing already how they would recur
just a small glimpse of a future
that was sure to be waiting across
the sandbanks of history beached
and wailing as they stepped lightly
their minds locked into the same song
lyric in the same key listening to
the same silent sounds that she heard
when he returned as a scarlet cardinal
tapping that same rhythm on the pane
of window glass above the plastic
flying saucer where she kept his ashes.
Traversal
The power of a leaning stone extends beyond its own mass and into the surrounding
space that it confronts a sense of threat is manifestly present in the coldness of
the air the cold winter air of nighttime in the desert that surrounds the leaning
stones
men track across a deathly expanse of desert twisting their way between the rocky
cliffs keeping a safe distance from the leaning stones as they pursue their prey
protected from the coldness of the night
the tracked ones live inside their fear gasping for breath as if their lungs were
filled with water drowning in dryness between the shadowspaces of the leaning
stones starlit and empty within the persistence of the night
one man remembers home remembers a different space of color and light of
people contained within their stoic poverty a people who were free until the
shadows appeared until the leaning stones blocked out the sun and dried the
colors into gray and burned the waters from the bay leaving nothing behind but
salt
and the man sits on the ground as the others leave him continuing on their way
across the valley of stones leaving him to his own internal emptiness his mind
clear his body weightless leaving him to wait without waiting to dream
without dreaming and to die without dying.
Tidal
I was words before I was a writer
I was color before I smeared
my brush through pigment
Don’t tell me that these are not the same
* * * * * * *
Things improved as the sea receded
leaving fragments of shell and bone
there were couples everywhere
sinking into wet sand their bodies
stained in abstract patterns
blending into the ghost images
of ripples that the waves
had left behind
* * * * * * *
The sea had no memory of bodies
not even the ones contained
within its bulk it spilled its containment
fighting against the influx of river
* * * * * * *
Somewhere within the indeterminate
depths where warmth meets coldness
is a temperate zone of human factors
where the couples who are washed away
converge still clinging tightly
still marked with the painterly
flows of sand and the skin
deep imprint of shell
* * * * * * *
Life was abundant
as the sea returned bearing
its usual offerings of kelp
and husk to be collected
by the sons and daughters of the lost
their naked feet avoiding
the broken bones of ancestors
that the sea had once again discharged.
Paul Ilechko is the author of the chapbooks “Bartok in Winter” (Flutter Press, 2018) and “Graph of Life” (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Manhattanville Review, West Trade Review, Yes Poetry, Otoliths and Indicia. He lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ.