Stencils

Fog on the mountains makes stencils out of trees,
while crows make stencils out of me.
Ninety years, nine rusted chairs they sewed me into.
Years after birds became bees and top shelves Olympus,
I’ll be a willow, the whisp in velvet.

I’m sunk into the bottom of the bog I used to
coax fish out of when it was deeper and I, shallow.
When paths were paths and earth, dirt.
Now I tunnel tents and time tempests
with the shaking of my bones.

The mountains I once owned, own me, with a grip
of iron and coal sucked up in my car engine.
Ten mile radius with a feathered frontal lobe
and fettered soles and souls.  Reliance,
on the crosshatch windows at night.

I am on that mountain, above, and below,
pressed between pages and not yet picked by little hands.
Pickled, and not yet planted, like the stories set
in no-man’s land.  I am paper thin and running
to outrun the ten-foot man.