Undo it by Carl Phillips

Undo it

 

‘I can almost see again: we’ll drown anyway’

 

Deep from within the changing colors of a life

that itself keeps changing, I know the leaves prove

nothing – though it

does seem otherwise – about

how helplessness is not a luxury, not a hurt by

now worth all the struggling to take back, but

instead what we each, inevitably, stumble

sometimes into,

 

and sometimes through … As for

that grove-within-a-grove that desire has, so long,

looked like – falling, proof of nothing, carrion-birds

clouding the slumped boughs of the mountain ash –

 

I can almost see again: we’ll drown anyway – why not

in color? You’re no more to me a mystery, than I to you.