A Core and a Candle (Poem)

Posted on June 12th, 2017

Words & Photos: Niki Gresteri

{"type":"root","children":[{"type":"heading","children":[{"type":"text","value":"A Core and a Candle (out there, somewhere)\n","bold":true}],"level":6},{"type":"paragraph","children":[{"type":"text","value":"My time is a core on the flies' table. It gnaws my bones, leaning against the chair.\n\nAnd I'm afraid. Not of wearing thin. Not of the end.\n\nI'm afraid of losing something. Afraid of misplacing something; the one clean part that defines existence.\n\nI run through black air, against a sky heavy with curses and hope. The air spits my fatigue back at me, my weaknesses, and a lightness I don't have.\n\nAll this life, inevitably, slams into a windshield that isn't there. Up here it feels good, but I see nothing. I sense everything, and that's enough.\n\nThe sea is down there, as always, with swollen eyelids.\n\nA tray of mercury at the edge of the earth.\n\nThe horizon's diaphragm widens in the still air.\n\nAir distant and eternal, like those emerald waves that must be out there somewhere, in some hanging photograph.\n\nAt the pass, the old trees shift, or so it seems.\n\nThis mountain has become my crumbling home, full of spare parts for melted dreams.\n\nA tent for tightrope walkers of clouds and wounded snow. And yet I keep coming back here, stupidly happy.\n\nThere are small footprints ahead of me. The purity of a wild, instinctive existence.\n\nWe breathe each other in without knowing who we are. The same spark. The same flame."}]}]}

I climb over the last tower.

A remote silence rises from the depths of the forest. It's a tide of trees, and it covers everything I am, everything I'm not, and everything still to come.

I embrace the last great trees. They still stand. I wish I could stand with them.

I let thoughts and crystals drift free before nightfall.

Shadows wrap around everything. There's no reason to fear anything.

No fear now.

I keep running, through fine needles and hidden eyes.

Only to lose myself, without trace, without sound, at the end of what I am.

An evensong dissolved in mercury.

For the end of what I am; because within fragility, there is awareness.

No fear now.

Still a core and a candle, out there, somewhere.