Ghost Spaces
There is radiance in ghost
spaces, hanging in the air,
a vapor stain. The terns
knew it, circling
above the dead wetland,
tule, sedge and cattail
in one season gone to dust.
Even the yearlings knew it,
shimmer of their summer
tide marsh still rising
through the alkaline
cracks. This is the shape
of things in time.
Vast waterscapes breathed
in the bird heart,
their chemical memory strung
to vagrancy and flux.
The men saw a horizon
clogged with mud and tough
bulrushes, crust
of salt on the stalks,
a haze of nameless insects.
A billion teeming beings did not rush
to greet the railroad, dike and sump.
Their look was elsewhere.
After weeks of soaring, circling,
muscle, hunger,
they dropped from the sky in soft clots
their bones turning to a future
bounty. There is radiance
in ghost spaces that
still breathe and heave and fruit
with dust, shining back,
between tides, between
extinctions, the shapes of things
that were, or may have been.
Header photo of cracked mud by rafaeleparente, courtesy Pixabay.