Love downward

 

The sky sheds it no longer can hold,

today, is a rain of tiny violets,

shaking off the branch to die in common dirt.

They settle against the feet,

small, cooling stars turning into soil

that once hallucinated their color.

I watch them and feel the slow silt of years

thickening inside my chest—

a steady, internal autumn where light grows long

and the bone begins to lean.

 

Is this what the blood has been rehearsing?

This gradual turning towards the dark, damp quiet?

If love has a direction, it must be downward.

  

It is gravity that pulls the blossom to the root,

a radical kindness that allows petals to rot

so stems can shudder with a new green.

  

To die is to become feast.

To vanish for the next bloom’s arrival.

I look at my hands, stained with ink of thousand ghosts,

and ask the river—that silver, indifferent muscle carving the valley—

what remains of a man who has lived only in the breath of words?

 

If I am not the flower, let me be the mulch.

If I cannot be the song, let me be the silence

that makes the next singer possible.

To die beautifully is to go without grievance,

unclasping the world as the violet lets go of the air.

  

No jagged edges, no desperate holding,

just a final, shimmering gift of a body

offering itself back to the ground.

This is the perfect death:

as love downward.