falling from grace
in this forest
a great tree falling
does not fall alone
He would run if he had feet to run but he can only breathe and splinter,
his fingertip twigs laced tightly with old fellows', holding hard to the years
but the wood tears like dried flesh, muscle from bone, the skin ripping back,
and it seems as if the sky has lost its place too, the noise thundering inside
his head, ballooning like a dust cloud. Everything, even the tiniest
spinning in the wind: moss, twigs, birds, rats and weta in the leaf litter
circling, swirling, laying down, floating, turning round and round, and round
till the quiet too is fallen, a silence that spreads and rises — a helicopter lifting
away from the scene, the tangle, a scar forming in the shadowed greenery
open to the storm.