or a song for my archer

Fly over the edge!
The wind will rise to greet you,
Tearing, tearing, clawing at your face,
embittered with tears and cold and ice,
scream! I will howl with you!
As the Earth below rises to swallow
our frost-laden limpid useless figures
scattering like glass breaking, fractured
into a million billion tiny parts of you and I
strewn all across and around, enveloping the mountains
and the waters which we have so often walked
in our dreams together, barking, breaking,
running and swimming towards some distant bauble
moonbeam thimble. Last Christmas I
saw you crying, saw you waiting terribly
for something that would never come to you.
And now I feel like crying to, for all that
you have lost and all that you should have been.
All that you would have could have been.

So many times we’ve walked these shattered woods,
where leaves turn up rotten on the forest floor,
where great beastly trees reared their heads
and then fell. So many times we have hidden
in the craggy nook of two branches. In the cave
left behind where the roots tore up the Earth.
Somehow, though, I think I never really saw it.
Never really saw you here with me.
It’s a stagnant place now, though I know you’ll never
know it. All the birds have left
the ground cold and barren in the snow
(which we never thought would come,
though we wished for it in more ways than I can count.)
Here, here is the well all burnt and charred and falling
all into pieces at my unladen feet. I wonder
how many pennies have we left behind here?
How many dreams have we left behind us?
It’s a sad thing to forget all that you have
ever wanted and all that you have said.

But I’ll think of you still
when you call my name.