This is excerpted from a longer piece I am working on and seem to be struggling to finish. I thought this was a nice segment, and it stands alone rather well.

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Channels

The paths between things are not always clear.
Latticed labyrinths of light prattle through
the leaves of an oak tree, down its meridian
into striated bands of shade and
wimpling white shimmer,

recalling the slow thrush
of water, coruscant with late afternoon.
Slower, still. Rust sky and

a woman, maybe dying; the warm months
entering their long contraction. She is not
dying but (something very similar.)

It is possible to love someone for years
and then never speak to them again.
And then to wonder if what you felt

was tactile, deep rooted, or if it were like
the coolness of shade in late summer,
the light pale gold with its failing.

In Central Asia, fishing boats linger
and litter the brine desert.

Jilted lovers. The Aral Sea

in retreat. Dammed and diverted.
Here, her last sentinels, their rusted
bones being devoured by wind and heat,

to become indiscernible scrap. The functional
rendered obsolete.

Upstream, up desert, upwind,

cotton fields are flourishing. And, on the banks of
a stream in the mountains of the Shenandoah,
a man is slipping his ex-wife from her shirt,

her breasts furrowed with the lines of age
and children. As he pulls the shirt over her head,
he is stunned, for less than a second,

by the way sunlight streams through
the thatched fibers of cotton. Then,
he reacquaints himself with the
spare hardness of her nipples,

the dreams of fisherman
in the moistness

of her chatoyant eyes,

closed in vigorous pleasure.