Offspring

Offspring

- Ivy Elle Nowosad

The day is windless, the sky powdery,

blue as held breath.

Grasses and browning weeds prickle, feet

avoiding barbs.

Long shadows of trees slice the clearing,

fingers reaching,

more alive and tangible than the

trees that cast them.

My gaze follows their penumbra,

toward the lake,

refusing the day's mindless brilliance.

A shard of sky

Is the lake, a view to a viewing,

squinting against

the small casket's glare. Me, bird-dog still,

watching for what?

A ripple, bubbles, some sign of life?

How can it be,

something vast as sky is now a shard,

a memory?

The reflection on the lake, the sky's

vanishing twin,

and that shimmering slab on the

butcher's board, cut

from an animal that once roamed

the earth. All vivid,

animals sparking across the plane,

then gone. One day,

the lake will be gone too and what

will take its place?

If the water is the sky's offspring,

water its source

And its glue, each bears the other,

Interwoven.

How could the sky continue to be

without the lake?

Hours dissolving, the lake reflects

its former self.

Me, the water, all motionless

beneath bruised clouds.

Dusk, its fleeting allure is clear.

The lake and I

are almost invisible, starless.

Frog song drowns out

my chattering teeth, and finally,

surrendering

to the absence of light, I see

beneath the surface,

see the woman veiled in black. How she

resembles me,

floating beneath the weight of water.

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