I look, in squirrels that pause,
consider me mid-path
for something of a heartfelt friend,
a soul still
as sweet as steady,
not yet asleep nor worse, beneath
the violet-tinged and twisted vines,
the lined last light,
or time, the trickling rip of veins
dissolving into death, their crest,
the bloom we lose to sight already sore, filled
with feeble leaves
and wind that sees them free.
Kaitlin Dyson
Originally published in Amaranth