ES(R) / Falling Leaf

 ES(R) / Leaf falling

Cold oil rises in the water.

The oil rises in that distant water.

The sight is like a crane,

Which flies separate its wings

And goes to paint water

As light the daughter sings

The oil falls as the pilgrim atomizer,

Who short-sighted sees down as up

And the boy, its sole advisor,

As no different from an elephant.

The quiet water serenades 

What cannot be reclaimed in normal modes.

It tries again tonight, alone,

To convince us they are miscible

But it is broken language that it screams,

Like the self-knowing of a blue dream haze,

Like shivering cold together fires,

Like one and one, and two separate

In absence of the lost world,

The bubbles of mostly oil in water

Collide and explode in fair measure

We forget about the boy and daughter

Cold oil rises in the water

The oil rises in that distant water. 

Cradled back and forth in the arms of the wind

Slowly cascading down, as slow as I walk.

Our green ribcage seems to place its bind

Over the undinal flesh of the moving sky

Below me, a woman wears her cardigan

And a man walking by her holds a bag.

I am, like a rag, rustling against their feet.

Sliced open to bear the words again:

Artemis II set for this Wednesday

Precessing about their lives uncaring of the wind,

A hundred faces in their motion on that bough,

And, above them, the element strives to say

We are lunar and all-together good again.

The candle struggles to persist over the smell 

Of cold oil rising in the water of our eye sockets.

We cannot bear to look at that distant falling leaf,

Jostled from its branch by the sound of rockets.

Upon each glimpse we rectify by placing yet again,

Another epicycle upon our moral model of the stars

To convince ourselves we are something close to human.