Bone Gravity
They came with sweet grasses, windroot
and dream recipes, veil whispering, don’t die.
But the boy already coughed three days
red rain, upon being so close to the other side,
and so far from this one, he staggers up,
rising like root into the purple night,
in search of home. A child knows how to die
about as much as any of us.
I go after him into the Black Hills
not as the others do to bring him back,
but to guide him there, to help release him
from bone gravity.
At Wolf Creek I find him
crushed beneath the half moon, where as a boy
I was told Crazy Horse used to ring his axe.
Say child, alone there all fire-twisted,
what of the night? Startled back from where
he had just been, the wildly thin body
takes off running, so I run with him, but he can't
run long, so I walk with him, and as he begins
to lean and give himself, I gather him up
in my arms like flames, and walk out
towards the blue light—my child, my tiny spirit
of wandering love.
Zachary Asher Greenberg has an MFA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University, where he is co-founding editor of the online literary arts journal Nashville Review, and where he facilitates creative writing workshops for cancer patients and survivors. His poems have appeared in The Columbia Review, CutBank, and The Greensboro Review, among others. His chapbook of poems, Scarlight, is forthcoming from Ravenna Press next year.