The Echo of What Remains Collected Poems of Wanda Lea Brayton
She crept through penumbrae, a demure cereus
opening carved portals to the blindness of night.
Conceived by an ingenuous rebellion,
she was an inconspicuous thief, pocketing mere moments
as if they were crumbs, never meaning to leave a trail.
Her decline into obsolescence was near-perfect.
These illusions of her glissade were mythic in proportion,
as indecipherable as Sanskrit buried beneath hennaed sand.
She purchased a lien on slowly walking backwards
and casually purloined any memory of existence.
She had no intention
of becoming anyone's precious, gasping bird,
clutched within a fragile origami existence.
She girded herself for a battle that would not come,
secure in the knowledge that her cupboards held only dust.
The tenacious white heat of her sinew
turned toward water's edge,
where driftwood cautiously waned with a startling creak
and crack of ancient things splintering -
dew evaporated with any remaining desire for cessation.
Silence grew thick and dangerous with wisteria.
The moon's pulse was frail with famine, its murky swells, indeterminate.
Stars punctured this sculptured quietude with forgotten echoes.
It was a bold and reckless harvest -
no one knew her secret name as she unfurled into fog.
She unwillingly writhed beneath lucidity's austere currents,
trying in vain to remember the sea.
The darkness shuddered soothingly
with the low rustle of a violet shroud
as she secured mortar between those burnished bricks
that separated her from an achingly fragrant world.
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