On this earth it is the season when all the air is blue and filled with wet lungs.
Winter has carried the weight of old civilizations.
My Father and I are waiting again for Sebastian’s return.
We wait by the slate pined shores of the oiled Atlantic
He tells me, “Hope cannot reverse the salt from that old water.
It will still gather on our lips.”
Spring will brush this weight off,
When it is new like a flower that has held on to let loose from its green wrapped egg.
That’s when my father decides to build the fire near us now
With the dead pine in the water and the green skunk cabbage
that has climbed out finally between our neighbors’ gravestones.
He pulls it all up and all is combined into flame in front of us
My father drinks his coffee in the backyard and
we watch together the white smoke from its hotness spill through the air
to mix with the ash and old illness our ancestors
had brought who came here on the sick barges
It is the smoke and my father’s coffee
that brings them here today again to gather up together
to our gray sky where it will sit thick with the wetness of ancient illness.
The air has been left clinging to their empty words
Like breath clinging to the trichomes of a browning vine.
We will sit here watching the water
around us like a taste of soil
Until the birds of King Sebastian have returned.
They will have traveled as much as we have.
They will have traveled from those mountains of those islands in our ocean.
My father stokes the fire mass on our lawn now
with the stub of a new green pine bow, his coffee in hand.
M.P. Domingos joined the military a good bit of time ago to experience the real world before getting out. Neither have happened. He writes when he can, usually at the most inconvenient times on anything he has available to him. He edits at night on an old computer after the kids go to bed.