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 vivid 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 child,
like that delicate form on the
butcher's board, cut
from an animal that once roamed
the earth. All of us,
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,
the woman veiled in black. How she
resembles me,
floating beneath the weight of water.