Six Months of Sundays

Since you stood on the edge of the cliff
Above the spill of lava boulders,
Wavering angel of your own death—

Write your way backward from your ending
If you want to attempt mimesis
In a portrait of your universe.

The future will never exist, yet
We are drawn to the end, the vortex
That creates the patterns draining us.

Notice the absence of that word—like.
What draws us is not like the vortex,
It is the vortex of gravity.

The cat always set among pigeons,
Our conclusion is always with us,
Never beyond us, always in us.

Storytelling somehow manages
To deny this by rearrangements.
Words are your memories, narrator,

These stones you pile as your monuments.
Recognition of the familiar,
The ability to do something

With or without an explanation,
Those are the memories of the flesh.
Stories made of words construct the rest,

Heaped up to be dragged back down again.
Our minds swarm out, like termites or ants,
To repair slumped narrative towers,

And there’s no reversing that habit.
But the world of falls draws to its ends,
And your ruins in ruin begin.