It's Still Life

A Haibun Poem for dVerse Poets

Dust swirled behind the car and I remember thinking, I want a long white lace veil when I get married. I was 14. The road ahead was silent and empty, the woods thickly green rising up from earth’s heart, stumps like elbows and trees tall as time waiting by a river so clear that stones at the bottom shone through in the sunlight. The sky was sealed blue with breaths of clouds sleeping like hills, and I remember the car’s windscreen, a splattered mosaic of insects, and Mum saying that her aching hands were a plague on her mood. I sat in the backseat, reading a book, giving myself motion sickness. Dad steered the car off the road, and I fled into an aura of green, through huckleberries and fiddlehead ferns, and let fly the deepest contents from my stomach. Buzzing insects black as asphalt hitchhiked on my arms and neck, this aura of green turning dark, this forest of thirsty souls in carved wood, and this place seemed cold without a future tense. I remember looking down and my feet had no ankles, and the air a violence like a Delacroix painting. And then I fainted. Are you sleeping, darling? I heard Mum’s voice. I remember wondering when her hair had become a chorus of white.

I am dreaming
It’s the deepest word I know
Are you sleeping, darling?

for Haibun Monday at dVerse Poets. Includes the word “hike”   © Misky 2020. Featured photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash