PoetrySally Seck

The reason you came

PoetrySally Seck
The reason you came

Unstable melting,
this winter heat haze,
this flickering shift
of perspective.

These magpies flying low.

This snow that’s melting
that’s been melting
for awhile now.

These songs I’ve been
singing these songs that are
stuck in my head over and on repeat.

Desert air, scratchy throat
with the vanilla pine of purple
prickly pair and the sound
of teeth on marble. The feeling and
fear of avalanche, of that slide
too big to run from, of that
sand you can’t control. Those
were the nightmares I had,
I realize: when I was small:
action counteracted and sand
shifting pushed but falling
back on to me, on this
abstract scale this greenscreen
abyss scene of sissyphan slope.

Sitting one way and leaning the other.

In the mountain trailer park,
over the wind whistling across
the siding. I can see a hundred
miles south I can see hundreds
of white-capped peaks in Virginia,
we could walk up Whitetop Mountain,
just the one. The way you try on a new
place for long enough and then nothing else
seems to fit right anymore.

People say they go back to the green
of the forests of the east coast their
loves and first breaths and but now
it feels so small there, like your eyes
adjust and hawk-eyed you are unable
to shift back and focus just right here
anymore you are looking for an outward
looking for a heart bursting opening
up but it isn’t there, just a tangle
of greens shining slick in the sun, just
the thing you were missing the reason
you came back at all.