When He Leaves

Jagged individual, rugged when you fall, in your looking back with shoulders and wind, your teeth shaken into ridges as you turned, first with the mass of your being, then as you grew as your own. That light that kept you breathing and the mother when she whispered that you, among them all, were favored, faded into the sound you learned to make with your sliding against the rules, the hissing you insisted you taught them all. Into the flight, when you strode forward with such bravery, you were shining like no other you had known before, without anyone else, into the air that could not breathe without you so that you became that which was the only. Time fled. You were time, too. So into yourself and all you are, as you lie still now, your body among the bodies. That which you were alone, you are again alone with them all.


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