RELIQUARY

RELIQUARY

by

Jamie Dedes

We flew along the freeway yesterday under

a cold coastal expanse of cerulean ceiling.

·

It reminded me of you and how we dusted

the vaults of your mind to rid them of fear

and the old lexicons of grief and guilt, the

whalebone girdles of unfounded faith and

everyday conventions, sticky and saccharine.

I thought of that one sea-green day we spent

·

under just such a sky in a land far away and

how we changed your name then and rewrote

your story to tell of oak trees instead of old times.

You sketched flowers blossoming in the dust

of a spring that promised but never delivered.

Now we don’t speak of men, but of cats with

·

their manner of keeping heart and claws intact.

We tell ourselves stories in music that resounds

in deep sleep. After all the ancient calls to

feral festivals will still and time coming when

we no longer play in margins, memories hung

on our skeletons like Spanish moss on cypress.

·

It pleases me that fissures spin into poemed reliquary

and the pink poeu de soie I wore to our prom that June.

Photo credit: Stupa (reliquary) With Pillars, Gandhara 2nd Century courtesy of PHGCOM under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License