It's Still Life

This is a haibun poem for dVerse Poets. We were asked to recall a wedding, but that’s a personal memory I shall keep for myself. So here’s something that deviates a bit from the prompt.

Veils

Dust swirled behind the car and I remember thinking, I want a long white lace veil when I get married. I was 13. The road ahead was silent and empty, the woods rising green 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. 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 back seat, reading a book, giving myself motion sickness. Dad steered the car off the road, and I fled into the 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, the aura of green turning dark, the forest like thirsty souls in carved wood. This place was 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, love?” I heard Mum’s voice. I remember wondering when her hair had become a long veil of white.

I am dreaming
it’s the deepest word I know
are you sleeping, love?