The Silver Pull

It's time for you to go.

You can't always be trusted to know when it's time,
but I've learned the change in the air.
Metal, sweat, and wood charcoal coming off your breath and skin
tells me you've got maybe a day
to get down to your cave if you only want to use two legs.

Soon the silver will be in your eyes;
and the light. A flush in your skin;
the little tremors and the glisten

Rarely are you still here by then,
because then you'd have to leave without kissing the children.
But when it can't be helped,
you lope out the door with your head covered;
your arms and legs not moving right.

Once, during a cold and leafless young spring,
the kind that pulls on you constantly,
I tracked down there to be with that other you;
drawn by the five senses of your changing;
wanting into that other side of your awareness.

Somehow, I found your trace,
down to the rocky entrance that sheltered you.
With a tumble and fitful reachings I found my way in
through remnants of bird, rodent, cat.
All I found were mats of fur and grass
layered so strongly with the scent of your habitation
that I could smell my own intrusion.

You were not there.

The sounds of your breath and stamping outside
formed up from the silence, now that I'd stopped moving.
Backing out the tunnel, I found you
by the silver light of your eyes,
and your damp phosphorescence in the starlight.

You were dancing.

You pattered, hunched and swayed around your work:
movements of hips and waist and hair all over.
Parts of you gleaming unexpectedly as you turned to me,
as if the dimness masked unmeasured scales, horns, beak;
indefinite in the absence of light and examination.

You were not happy to see me.
Was that the emotion?
Was it emotion?
You approached, and dirt fell to the ground from your hands,
earth-soaked to the wrists.

Afterward we decided I should never do that again;
with no way of knowing the line between me
and my finger bones arranged at the threshold,
or my split thigh bone used to furrow shapes in the dirt.

As the seasons change,
so does your shape
and your place.

Sometimes, in the safety of the day,
I examine the things you've left at a site you've abandoned
to wash or blow away whatever you made:
bone sculptures, dirt maps, grass dolls;
wild twins to the crafts made by the unsilvered you.
But, oh, still you;
really, really you.

I thieve a grass doll meant for decay;
something to link me
to the world of you that only roots and branches
beyond the walls I bring everywhere with me.

I'm a thief, because I know you meant it to lie there
unowned.