‘Eclipse’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Eclipse

you awake in a bush
the road, deepening to a crisp orange around the cracked clay and gravel,
stretches its curving spine over the
heat-laden heaps of jaundiced grasses
hips and elbows and buttocks of fertile dirt
in it burrows mice and vole
you can hear their hearts pumping beneath
the substrate
timid feet skittering through veins of earth

you’re planted on the soil, toasting under an emptying sky
you’re naked, crescent flare boring into your drooping back
starting between stooped shoulders
your pores well with reflective beads
thousands of wet eyes to see the blackening hole
coils of smoke slither up from the sparse trees
that you can see, the vertebrae reaching for cloudless
cerulean that purples as it meets the dirt
rippling with warmth and sagebush
all these shadows trembling in foretaste

your fingers and toes are knotty branches
brittle from drought and hot shale
there’s a distance between you and them
a rift in your senses
swaying like the aspen and limber pine as you rise
an Almeh astray in ardent orange and dusty saffron
timber to singe and turn to skeletal ash
there is no white to your eyes
in the sand you scrape a garden of footprints towards
the water, a flat Shangri-La beyond the expanse
rainbows and redbands swim corridors and chasms
sparrows greet the steam writhing off the surface

you drag your sack of bones and muscle
weary under the might of a waning sun ligaments and sockets thrust and strain
such a machine, desperately following the valley road
so mortal, the gouge in the earth that plunges to her
swelling cobalt blood

your feet reach the shore
followed by knees and elbows and ribs
obedient soldiers to the fatigue
you watch the crescent grow atop the water
as rays descend like gallow branches
a hollow reckoning gapes in the sky
surrounded by glowing lips as the humps and canyons
begin to blue and cool
you scoop it into your florid palms
and drink the empty sun.

Autumn Farmer is an artist and writer studying Creative Media at Champlain College. Throughout her time on earth, she has used poetry as a coping mechanism and way of documenting every day life, however exciting or mundane. She has had several poems published in the Rutland Herald, as well as a creative nonfiction essay in the North Dakota Quarterly.