The Sediment of Song

The river does not go dry all at once.

First, the rapids soften to a whisper,

then the stones expose their spines,

bleaching white like bones picked clean by hunger.

We watch the water pull back its hem,

leaving silt to harden

into a map of where we used to be.

¶

They tell us the language is sleeping,

but a sleeper breathes, stirs beneath their skin.

This loss is a different kind of quiet.

It is the cedar leaning toward the wind

that no longer carries the names

our grandmothers gave the clouds.

It is the gap in the prayer

where the precise word

for the-way-the-light-hits-the-underside-of-a-birch-leaf

should have caught the sun.

¶

It settles in the marrow, this slow frost.

It appears in ordinary places–

in the grocery aisle,

where the labels gleam in the flat tongue of factories,

offering nothing

to the ghosts who wait by the door.

It lives in the way my hands move when I speak,

gestures tracing stories

whose syntax was planed thin

by the boarding school floor–

leaving only rhythm,

a pulse that refuses to forget.

¶

But absence is not empty.

It has weight–

like wet wool in winter.

It echoes in the way we hold silence,

not as void,

but as vessel.

¶

In the soil,

the ancestors do not know the asphalt,

but they recognize the heat of our feet

pressing down, searching for the old paths.

¶

In the smoke,

the sage still carries a thousand sunrises,

even when the songs we offer it

arrive in fragments–

stitched with maybe,

with I remember.

¶

In the blood,

memory is a stubborn wire,

conducting a current

from a fire we cannot see

but still feel

against our palms.

¶

The loss has changed shape.

It is no longer a wound–

it is the scar

that strengthens the grip.

¶

We are the people of the wide-reaching shadow,

learning to live

between the word and the wind.

¶

The river is low, yes–

but we are learning to drink

from the deep, hidden springs

the map-makers forgot to name.

¶

We mourn the fullness of the current,

but we honour the dampness of the clay.

¶

Even now, in drought,

we are still

made of water.