A TREE ON PACIFIC

Kay H.

"If I could kiss your sole once again, Mother."                                     I SAT BY THE HARBOR,  TALKING TO THE  WIND, LIKE A HOLLOW TREE,  WEEPING FOR  ANCIENT SOULS,  FOR MIRACLES.  IT WASN'T THE  WISDOM'S  SEASON  THOUGH I  HEARD  A PASSER- BY, IN DISGUISE, WHISPERING "THE DEATH IS  THE ONLY RELIEF MAN IS  SCARED OF." BUT WHEN I TURNED AROUND ; OH DEAR Me- DAMN  ! HE'S  GONE.

If I Could kiss bottom of Your Sole Once Again, Mother

(A Poem of Hollow Harbors and Vanishing Voices)

I sat beside the harbor,
conversing with the wind—
a wind too old for answers,
too bruised to sing.

Like a cathedral of bone,
I waited,
weeping into the salt,
for souls that once were miracles
and now—are myths.

It was not the season for wisdom,
and yet,
from the mouth of a passerby  in borrowed form,
came a whisper shaped like prophecy:

“Death is the only mercy
man fears to meet.”

But when I turned—
Oh, wretched awe—
he was no more.

(The Unbelievable Epilogue)

Then—
the tide rose
in your voice.

Mother.
Your voice.

It called through the shivering dusk:
"Child, kneel not to the wave.
Do not tithe to the gale.
The sole you seek to cradle
has crossed the quiet veil.
Yet I am near—
in the ache between your steps,
in the salt behind your silence.”

I clenched my hands—
or were they yours?
For time had folded.
And the dead do not speak.
And the sea does not lie.

But there—
your shadow grazed mine.

Now, only the wind remains.
Only the hollow.
Only the unbearable almost
of your vanished soul.

No lips.
No breath.
Only absence—
and the memory of weight
where once the world was touchable near you.

***

And then—  then— 
where the tide bloomed beside me,
not water, but your voice:
"Child, do not kneel here.
The sole you grieve is not drowned—
it becomes the horizon’s edge,
the salt-light where waves fray.
Touch this instead: the air
where my shadow once weighed
the world down."

I reached—
(the bloom dissolved like a sigh)—
for the dead refuse nothing,
but take no shape we recognize.

Yet there it was:
your name,
written in wet sand
by no hand.

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