Crossing Path

A poem

I still walk down the path through briars and brambles towards an image of you obscured by fallen limbs and stems and shoots that dissect your body into shapes I piece you together with the clay I found when I wouldn’t stop digging I fill in the cracks with all I ever knew to be able to see all I ever saw To see you is to behold the proof of what sense’s observations make real: something to move towards

A soft blur among the thorns, tangled twigs rattle as though someone’s brushed past, a tattered scrap of denim caught on a branch, the butt of a cigarette half-buried, footprints in the soil coming from the opposite direction, but we always miss each other This trail we walk will soon be grown over, boughs will fall, and all I will see are the woods between us, so far from each other that when I hear a tree fall, you will say there was no sound