Love's histories aren’t mysterious.
In the Holocene meadow
slow carved by snow’s retreat
kinnikinnik reddens at summer's end.
Tall grasses press in where elk rest.
Between shoulders of sun-flecked granite,
sky colors expand in last asters
and bee-throated gentians.
Moss colonies marry water and rock.
By the creek, two homesteaders—
clavicle and breastbone—rest under stones,
half clutched by a conifer lost to lightning.
Each night we lie down to disintegrate
in the meadow, our lives make shadow paths
like fallen firs sunk in grass,
bark peeled back to heartwood—
10,000 summers collapsed
and held in sapling roots.
Radha Marcum’s first poetry collection, Bloodline, received the 2018 New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She is a graduate of Bennington College (BA) and the University of Washington, Seattle (MFA), where she was awarded the Klepser Fellowship in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including FIELD, West Branch, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Iris, Chelsea, The Bellingham Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Taos Journal of International Art and Poetry. She lives in Colorado where she teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.
Featured image by Radha Marcum.
