nevermore

Nevermore near Never-Never Land had waited, abiding, until Time was done. Before she was Nevermore she was Space and she was here, tasting like soil & salt, iron & leaf, fruit & flesh.

No, she insisted, she did not need another distant photo of herself framed with an airy sentiment in glass. But Time and his countrymen either did not hear or did not care. She shrugged, sighed.

Before she was called Nevermore by the keepers of the Neverlands, she had been an endless, renewing enough: of water, bird, breath, wave, weed, gale, flame, and rain––wanting only to be tended, absorbed, heard, caught, ridden, warmed into, and met with open hands.

The Neverlanders thought instead to take and stake her, carving their names, instead projecting upon her the warped and boundless entropies of their endlessly whirring heads, as if to spin away from gravity herself where she palmed the souls of them at their feet.

Sigh again, winds, for those who can imagine no space greater than the ones between their ever-stopped ears, that neglect who is before them ever, in favor of Somedays and One Days and Next Times, claiming to Finally See.

––Until Nevermore, at the end of their Time, stopped hoping they would ever get around to the real work of tending, preoccupied as they were with their confidence and confidences.

She would retreat beneath the soils of herself again, fold her wet through running sands, run her rivers underground. Time went up and out––away, away––storming plans for monuments to legacies.

Sigh again, no longer asking for a hand to come for the tending, that wave now whisper, stay, to meet at last the rock of those waiting shores, and carve another layer smoother ––in.