Metamortality

Richland Balsam Mountain, North Carolina (June 2025)

Does the snake look back with longing, 

oh, soft translucent skeleton that held

her hopes and fears and desires—

until it could not? 

Does the butterfly carry a memory of that comforting, 

smothering coffin of birth 

as she dances with the sunlight? 

Perhaps the vigil is not for the shell, but for the knowing 

that though the slivered skin 

remains

she does not. 

The place is there, but she-of-the-place has slipped away. 

For what is life but a series of slipping aways,

each moment falling behind us

into the earth;

the art of perpetual decay.

There is a gentle grief in living—

cradling the corpses of our past

as they birth our future.