Fragments of Temperance by Nuala Weening

Beams flick from leaf to petal, skipping softly, half-aimless,their mellowed shine stitching a dappled constellation across the forest floor.

I watch the light shiver through your silvered hair, trembling, uncertain,as if it senses the slight unravelling of your being.

Mottled bark loosens, slips from the towering gums,from the pendulous hush of wattles-

And in its quiet shedding,I see your skin begin to remember,

every year it has carried,your face freckled with the slow fatigue of time.

The hands of the clock creep, steadily. Tiredly.As if they, too, know where this will lead.

Know our weary rhythm, worn thin with repetition-Our reaching for something once effortless.

You stare at my raw fingers,petalled with pink, threaded with blood.

“Weather’s nice,” you murmur.I nod. You don’t wait for it.

Across the cold stone, the light flinches and flees-a golden ghost with somewhere else to haunt.

The heat mirage shimmers, silk-thin,its languid ripples bending the horizon out of itself.

A certain sweetness in the air lingers: greedy, gloating.Ash threaded through it, burnt wood clinging underneath,a scent that settles stickily into the lungs.

Through the settling cinders, a shadow stirs,doleful eyes and hesitant paws,

Slipping through soot-light,wading through the remains of a world that forgot to stay.

I am a poor cartographer of this vanishing.of the inevitability of change, the certainty of fleetingness.

I cannot grasp it, the meaning of it.Of life, fraying at its seams.

Moments, wet silt, slipping, reshaping. Memories, silent stones in riverbed light,connections, unthreading at the knots that once bound us.

To be frank, I watch it vanish so closely I forget it ever lived.